“Guns, Germs, and Steel” is truly a fundamental book that one should read to enlarge one’s vision.
You will not get a CLEAR picture of everything; that’s simply not possible taking into account the amount of information, countless angles, and scales for the same event.
However, what a passionate anthropologist, Jared Diamond, offers here is a vast framework for understanding how was the world shaped as modern humans know it. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is a zoom out of the time and space to provide you with the widest possible view of what has been happening and is still happening on Earth for the past 200,000 years.
In one book, Jared Diamond manages to fit in and share his knowledge of history, anthropology, biology with genetics, geography and social sciences.
Using a plain language, the author extracts the juice from the global events to deliver the answers to the questions on why things went this way and not another, why did Europeans conquered Americas and not the other way around, to which extent some peoples were given an advantage contributing to a faster development and evolution compared to other ones.
Why didn’t capitalism flourish in Native Mexico, mercantilism in sub-Saharan Africa, scientific inquiry in China, advanced technology in Native North America, and nasty germs in Aboriginal Australia?
Why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?
For me, the sign that this work did influence my thinking, my whole being, was that feeling of childish excitement of discovery; it incited flow of thoughts and questions, inner dialogue and sometimes dispute with the author.
