Category Books

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies » (~)

Authors: Jared Diamond
ISBN-13: 9780393317558, ISBN-10: 0393317552
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Date Published: April 1999
Edition: ~

Author Biography: Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is professor of geography at UCLA and author of the best-selling Collapse and The Third Chimpanzee. He is a MacArthur Fellow and was awarded the National Medal of Science.

	Prologue: Yali's Question: The regionally differing courses of history	13
Ch. 1	Up to the Starting Line: What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B.C.?	35
Ch. 2	A Natural Experiment of History: How geography molded societies on Polynesian islands	53
Ch. 3	Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain	67
Ch. 4	Farmer Power: The roots of guns, germs, and steel	85
Ch. 5	History's Haves and Have-Nots: Geographic differences in the onset of food production	93
Ch. 6	To Farm or Not to Farm: Causes of the spread of food production	104
Ch. 7	How to Make an Almond: The unconscious development of ancient crops	114
Ch. 8	Apples or Indians: Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants?	131
Ch. 9	Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle: Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated?	157
Ch. 10	Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes: Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents?	176
Ch. 11	Lethal Gift of Livestock: The evolution of germs	195
Ch. 12	Blueprints and Borrowed Letters: The evolution of writing	215
Ch. 13	Necessity's Mother: The evolution of technology	239
Ch. 14	From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy: The evolution of government and religion	265
Ch. 15	Yali's People: The histories of Australia and New Guinea	295
Ch. 16	How China became Chinese: The history of East Asia	322
Ch. 17	Speedboat to Polynesia: The history of the Austronesian expansion	334
Ch. 18	Hemispheres Colliding: The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared	354
Ch. 19	How Africa became Black: The history of Africa	376
	Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science	403
	Acknowledgments	427
	Further Readings	429
	Credits	459
	Index	461

Category Books

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies » (~)

Author Biography: Jared Diamond

Book Synopsis

The New York Times Book Review, 1997 - James Shreeve

Table of Contents

Subjects