Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Book Review

No spoilers

Audible version! 17 hours running time!

Rating- 4.5/5 for this summary of history of the world!

Jared is a Pulitzer Prize winner and this book is one of TIME’s best non-fiction books of all time!

Just how Daniel Kahneman had mention of Amos in his very famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow; Jared here speaks about a politician called Yali whose question is the one which made him set on a voyage of writing this novel!

Even Jared himself states that though this is a short history of everybody for the last 13000 years, even if the book is a mammoth 450 pages edition with small print; it can still narrate only a part of the beast that is history!

Of course Jared gets this own take on how the three important things Guns, Germs and Steel in different combination and in different places had a big influence on the human civilisation!

This is not a bedtime story for kids! Though if you do read it in the night you can be sure to sleep like a baby due to its very slow pace and content! The first time I got the paper back edition I stopped after thirty pages! Then I got the e book version and stopped after fifty pages! That was three years back!

Finally got the audible edition and then finally I finished it and how! I cannot state more times that audio books are the next thing! I used to love the feel of books and that’s how I used to read them! Then Sony ebook reader and later on Kindle made me realise that ebook were better and easier with some compromise!
Now audio books and Bangalore traffic are like two negatives which has become a big positive for me! Two months and I have already finished more than five long books! This particular book is 17 hours long which is typically five day trip to work and back in Bangalore traffic!

Now coming to the book proper;

Jared mentions about the Homo Sapiens and other ancient species like Erectus and others and then goes to describe a battle between two tribes called the MORIORI and MAORI of New Zealand and how one tribe dominated another.

Most of his findings do go close to New Guinea and Australia and New Zealand where he has spend considerable time is my first guess!
What I was impressed even in the ebook was the battle of CAJAMARCA! The way he described it was so surreal. This example will be repeated in the book in different concept. In this case it was how steel made them win the war and in another how germ won the battle! Most of the time Jared gives excellent examples how Germ or Gun or Steel (meaning weapon) are one of the three most definitive determinants of which civilisation will thrive!

This is not a book where you remember things like a story but a reference manual which your will go back to refer!
So you have reference to how animals became domesticated and how many animals such as giraffe or zebra or cheetah cannot be domesticated or tamed!
The same with the plants which were actually wild to begin with and then they were domesticated with lots of interesting titbits in between! Such as how bitter almonds are actually toxic and poisonous and how they have been domesticated to be able to be eaten finally!

The same with mushroom and other vegetables!

He also mentions things like how big animals are difficult to domesticate not because their meat is not good where he adds that even lion meat is good by his own experience (that was a bit off for e though!). He did mention rare example of big animals getting tamed but that is rare and not perfectly tame in such as that they can become wild anytime!

He then traces many tribes who by virtue of germs, steel or gun got the upper hand and lived behind to write the history so to speak! Sometimes distance between two tribes does not make a difference while many times the distance is the only limiting factor!

He gives us glances of the Fertile Crescent and china and Africa and other places which were initially fertile and ripe so to speak before being converted to barren land of today! Then he also states how the unity of a country may sometimes impede development while sometimes it may help.

He talks about the Bantu tribes and their conquest and then about Japanese with other country coming in between as guest appearances!

The diction in Audio book is very pleasant and you will have no difficulty in understanding finally why this book is a big deal!
I am just happy that I could finish this behemoth and now I can take more!
Have fun…Listening!