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Books

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond · 1999 · 494 pages

6 people have this book on the record — 5 of 6 verdicts positive. The dissent stays on the page.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Jason Furman liked it
I have a soft spot for extremely broad histories like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World.

on fivebooks.com · 10 Dec 2022

Bill Gates loved it
I still rank Guns, Germs, and Steel as one of the best things I’ve ever read.

on gatesnotes.com · 20 May 2019

Joseph Henrich loved it
The book is a masterpiece in terms of integrating a vast range of material from different disciplines, material on language, archaeology, comparative bio-geography, with also lots of his own ethnographic field studies peppered in there.

on fivebooks.com · 13 Oct 2016

Radek Pietruszewski read it
Theory of history of human civilizations. This fascinating book explains why Eaurasians came to dominate most of the world, why native American, Australian, and sub-Saharan African peoples never had a good chance; and why European diseases decimated the native American population, but not the other way around.

on radex.io · 1 Jan 2016

Mark Lynas recommends it
This is a really useful way of trying to figure out why different humans turned out the way they did, while considering the influences of technology and of the environment.

on fivebooks.com · 12 Jun 2009

Find it on Open Library →  ·  This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.