Average Rating: 
Rating: - I guess some folks don't have the patience
I think some of the reviewers here didn't read the book closely enough to understand the context of some of Diamond's arguments. He never says that biogeographical effects are the ONLY causes history. His main purpose is the search for the ultimate, extremely general causes for the broadest of trends in human history and prehistory. By the time the Mongols roared across Asia, or the Moguls invaded India, many cultures around the world already changed so much that bioregional factors, though seminal in the creation of these broadest trends, weren't nearly as important as the political, religious and economic ones. He is not ignoring religion and so on but, he states plainly several times that isn't his focus. He is looking for ultimate causes--before humans had extremely advanced mental concepts like religion. He also wanted to point out the devastating influence of disease on history. It was surely the European germs that did most of the conquering of Native Americans. The guns and horses were almost incidental. Later on, once Europeans had established themselves, then we can focus on economic and political systems. But we can't ignore the effects of the diseases unleashed on the Americas. These plagues gave the Europeans a very lucky boost that catapulted them beyond the wealth and power of China, India or the Middle East--long before the Industrial Revolution made this gap obvious. Another thing that some people seem to be having trouble with is his assertions about the native intelligence of tribal peoples around the world. (If you read the book, you notice that he is not just saying this about the New Guineans.) He takes pains to point out what he means by this. He not talking about some mysterious genetic superiority of tribal peoples. It's all straight up culture. Tribal culture forces people to be better generalists than they'd have to be in literate civilizations. They can't rely on embedded support structures like books for memory or experts for obscure fields. They have to be pretty good at a lot things. Otherwise they die. They have to be better at memorizing things because they can't count on computers or books to remember things for them. Living in a dangerous, wild environment makes them cautious and aware of all that is going on around them. That was all he meant. The circumstance of tribal peoples force them, only in very broad ways and only on an individual basis, to be smarter and more curious than civilized people. And in the end it does them no good. Because civilized societies are SMARTER than tribal societies. That is why tribal society has been steadily disappearing over the millenia. They just can't compete. Finally, of course the book is repetitive. In fact he sums up his argument in the preface of the book. You needn't even read the rest if you don't want to. The rest of the book consists of him reiterating his points from different angles to point out the objections he has managed to answer and the many questions that still remain. He is just following scholarly practice and exposition--just to make things clear that he has thought about this. He knows that his theory can't explain everything. In the epilog he points out that China, India and the Middle East are good counter examples to his idea. They each had an expansionist rise to great power--a time when they were unafraid to try new ideas and explore new ways of doing things. If the highly complex forces of economics, politics, religion had arrayed themselves differently. We might all be speaking Arabic now. Or Cantonese. Europe was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time for things to come together as they did.
Rating: - Interesting and Thought Provoking
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson is an interesting read. The central thesis of the book is that the Western style of direct decisive infantry warfare, with roots in democracy and capitalism, has been historically superior and partly responsible for the Western Worlds superior position. Hanson seeks to present his book as a kind of rebuttal to Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. As to the latter objective. Hanson fails miserably for Hanson's and Diamond's theories are not inconsistent and Hanson's attempt to make them so detracts from the rest of the book.. Diamond's seeks to explain why it was the Spanish who conquered the Incas in 16th century Peru and not Incas who sailed to Madrid to conquer the Spanish. He theorizes that the Spanish had greater access to domesticatable crops and animals and European geography allowed for an easier exchange of ideas from other burgeoning societies. Hanson seeks to minimize the advantages of what Diamond speaks of and instead focuses on military strategy, and western economic and political thought. What Hanson misses is that without advanced military transport in the horse, the availability of sophisticated weapons, such as steel swords, rudimentary guns and cannon the Incas would never have been conquered. Hanson's own treatment of the conquest of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) in 1520-1521 is the proof. The Mexican Army utilized infantry tactics, since they did not have any calvary. They fought decisive battles with their opponents, since like the ancient Greeks they had a war season. While the Greeks was based on the harvest, the Mexican was based on the harvest and religious considerations. While they also fought symbolic flower wars these were not the ones fought to protect their Empire. The Spanish, with several hundred Spaniards and thousands of natives under Cortez, were able to defeat the Mexicans. It was the horses, guns and eventually smallpox which were decisive. There can be no argument that Spain or Cortez operated in a democratic or that capitalism was the basis of their economy. One can even argue that what defeated the Aztecs was their penchant for human sacrifice and the desire to capture Cortez instead of killing him. In numerous battles the Aztecs could have killed Cortez but did not. Hanson's and Diamond's book build on each other and offer a compelling explanation to justify each others theories. Hanson unintentionally builds on Diamond's concepts to explain why societies with equal resources do not necessarily develop equally. Otherwise, Hanson's book is well written and very interesting. It is in the description of the battles and the campaigns where he excels. It would have been better if Hanson had dealt with some of the possible exceptions to his theory - the century old Ottoman Empire, the supremacy of the Prussian military tradition which was hardly based on notions of democracy and the Russian almost suicidal defense of their homeland at Stalingrad. Maybe he is saving that for his next book.
Rating:  - Ignore the quibblers and naysayers
As all scientific inquiries do, this one began with a question. Jared Diamond, a physiology professor at UCLA and an evolutionary biologist working for many years in Papua New Guinea, was asked the question that launched this book by a native friend, Yali. To paraphrase, both the question and the thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel (GGS), "How come Western societies developed the means to conquer and exploit non-Western societies?" And why wasn't it the reverse -- why didn't the Americas conquer Europe, for instance?Thus begins what Diamond calls "13,000 years of history on all continents [compressed] into a 400-page book." The breadth of what GGS covers is breathtaking, and the conclusions, surprisingly, not at all counterintuitive. In fact, every time Diamond pointed out a conclusion based on his researches, it wasn't so much a door opened on a new room as a door opened on an old room I couldn't quite construct in my mind until I was shown how. I think that's how teachers teach best: not by showing you something entirely new, but by showing you how to fit together the jagged edges of pieces of the old you already know. To risk even further compression, here is what Diamond proposes. The necessary conditions for cultural triumph, in no particular order, are: population density, large animal domestication, food production (agriculture), resistance to diseases passed from animals and plants to humans, technological inventiveness and acceptance of change and improvement, literacy (at least among the elites), and centralized government. Add to that mix of accident and planning the good fortune of an east-west continental orientation -- and the consequent east-west spread of population, domestic animals, disease, technology, writing and government -- and you have the necessary conditions for a dominant society. However, as Diamond takes pains to point out, these are not sufficient conditions for success. A lot depends on chance, some of it on inventiveness in individual societies, some to forward-looking government, and some even to individual vision and initiative. It's as if, as I paraphrase from what he says at the beginning of chapter nine, which is Diamond's own paraphrase of Anna Karenina, "successful societies are all alike; every unsuccessful society is unsuccessful in its own way": <> If a society's population is not sufficiently dense, or has an unfavorable climate, or poor raw materials, it will never graduate from the hunter-gatherer stage;
<> If a society has no crops at hand that are suitable for domestication, they will never develop sufficient population density to overcome weaker societies;
<> If a society has no large animals at hand that are suitable for domestication, they will never develop sources of meat, transportation, beasts of burden and so forth;
<> If a society fails to develop dense populations of crops, animals and humans, they will never develop the germs, and resistance to those germs, that allow them to kill off (usually unintentionally) less dense, less resistant populations;
<> If a society fails to develop a population sufficiently dense to support specialist classes and a strong central government, it will never become organized enough to overcome or absorb its enemies in war. And so on. Diamond appears to agree with Hobbes that war is the natural state of humankind, and his examples demonstrate that depressing assertion. Likewise, he asserts that all centralized governments evolve into a "kleptocracy," which justifies feeding the rich off of the labor of the poor, either through fear of its power or through religion (which is another form of fear). In writing this book, Diamond at once provides a convincing explanation for the differing developments of human societies on different continents throughout human history, and explodes myths of innate racial superiority. The recurring theme that I glean from GGS is that the success of a society rests in equal parts on accident and on human intervention -- and not all of that human intervention is entirely conscious. Some of the author's detractors may say that his assertion that the east-west continental orientation of the Old World, versus the north-south orientation of the New World, is a strained explanation of societal success -- a geographical determinism -- but I must point out that Diamond stresses that there are no single causes: there are many causes of failure to develop "cargo," as the Guinean Yali put it. And there are many causes for societies who once had cargo -- like the medieval Islamic and the ancient Chinese, not to mention the ancient Mediterranean -- to lose their cargo and their superiority. But, as Diamond so excellently points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of the causes was not race.
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