Sign in with Facebook
Angela's Reviews > Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
by
by
This book attempts to answer the question: "Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren't Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?"
I found the first 3 parts of this book fascinating, in particular the discussions about plant and animal domestication. Part 4, in which we get a brief history of the world, seemed like mainly a summary of what had been discussed earlier in the book. I suppose the author was pulling everything together, but if you were paying attention to the earlier discussions, I think you already got it.
Overall: well worth the read, but you may find yourself skimming the last few chapters.
I found the first 3 parts of this book fascinating, in particular the discussions about plant and animal domestication. Part 4, in which we get a brief history of the world, seemed like mainly a summary of what had been discussed earlier in the book. I suppose the author was pulling everything together, but if you were paying attention to the earlier discussions, I think you already got it.
Overall: well worth the read, but you may find yourself skimming the last few chapters.
Sign into Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to see if any of your friends have read
Guns, Germs and Steel.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
August 24, 2010
– Shelved
September 1, 2011
–
Started Reading
September 4, 2011
–
21.17%
""Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world's actual food producers, aren't necessarily better off than hunter-gathers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gathers do.""
page
105
September 4, 2011
–
25.2%
""Crops starting out as weeds included rye and oats, turnips and radishes, beets and leeks, and lettuce.""
page
125
September 4, 2011
–
26.81%
""Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating.""
page
133
September 5, 2011
–
31.65%
""We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.""
page
157
September 5, 2011
–
33.27%
""Ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, and modern Indians, tamed cheetahs for use in hunting.""
page
165
September 5, 2011
–
34.88%
""Cats and ferrets are the sole territorial mammal species that were domesticated, because our motive for doing so was not to herd them in large groups raised for food but to keep them as solitary hunters or pets.""
page
173
September 8, 2011
–
41.33%
""Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.""
page
205
September 8, 2011
–
47.58%
""the first preserved example of Greek alphabetic writing, scratched onto an Athenian wine jug of about 740BC, is a line of poetry announcing a dancing contest: 'Whoever of all dancers performs most nimbly will win this vase as a prize.'""
page
236
September 12, 2011
–
75.6%
""... at high altitudes in the Andes, where genetically European women have physiological difficulties even in reproducing""
page
375
September 13, 2011
–
88.31%
""If your goal is innovation and competitive ability, you don't want either excessive unity or excessive fragmentation. Instead, you want your country, industry, industrial belt, or company to be broken up into groups that compete with one another while maintaining relatively free communication""
page
438
September 13, 2011
–
Finished Reading
