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The Fates of Human Societies
The Fates of Human Societies
By Jared Diamond
Read by Doug Ordunio
By Jared Diamond
Read by Doug Ordunio
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Category: World History | Audiobooks
Category: World History | Audiobooks
Audiobook Download $25.00
Jan 18, 2011 | 981 Minutes
CD $25.00
Jun 07, 2011 | 990 Minutes
CD $25.00
Jun 07, 2011 | ISBN 9780307932426 | 990 Minutes
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Jan 18, 2011 | ISBN 9780307932433
981 Minutes
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Jun 07, 2011 | ISBN 9780307932426
990 Minutes
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About Guns, Germs, and Steel
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize,Guns, Germs and Steelexamines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history.
Having done field work in New Guinea for more than 30 years, Jared Diamond presents the geographical and ecological factors that have shaped the modern world. From the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist, he highlights the broadest movements both literal and conceptual on every continent since the Ice Age, and examines societal advances such as writing, religion, government, and technology. Diamond also dissects racial theories of global history, and the resulting work—Guns, Germs and Steel—is a major contribution to our understanding the evolution of human societies.
About Guns, Germs, and Steel
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history’s broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the paths of development of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start. Only societies that advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage acquired a potential for developing writing, technology, government, and organized religions—as well as those nasty germs and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, that expanded to new homelands at the expense of other peoples. The most familiar examples involve the conquest of non-European peoples by Europeans in the last 500 years, beginning with voyages in search of precious metals and spices, and often leading to invasion of native lands and decimation of native inhabitants.
Listen to a sample from Guns, Germs, and Steel
Also by Jared Diamond
See all books by Jared Diamond
Also by Jared Diamond
See all books by Jared Diamond
About Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. The recipient of numerous awards, he has published more than 200 articles in such prestigious magazines asDiscoverandNature.
About Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. The recipient of numerous awards, he has published more than 200 articles in such prestigious magazines asDiscoverandNature.
Product Details
Category: World History | Audiobooks
Audiobook Download | $25.00
Published by Random House Audio
Jan 18, 2011 | 981 Minutes | ISBN 9780307932433
Category: World History | Audiobooks
CD | $25.00
Published by Random House Audio
Jun 07, 2011 | 990 Minutes | ISBN 9780307932426
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Praise
Artful, informative, and delightful…. There is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of a subject, and that is what Jared Diamond has done.—William H. McNeil, New York Review of Books
An ambitious, highly important book.—James Shreeve, New York Times Book Review
A book of remarkable scope, a history of the world in less than 500 pages which succeeds admirably, where so many others have failed, in analyzing some of the basic workings of culture process…. One of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.—Colin Renfrew, Nature
The scope and the explanatory power of this book are astounding.—The New Yorker
No scientist brings more experience from the laboratory and field, none thinks more deeply about social issues or addresses them with greater clarity, than Jared Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and Steel. In this remarkably readable book he shows how history and biology can enrich one another to produce a deeper understanding of the human condition.—Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University
Serious, groundbreaking biological studies of human history only seem to come along once every generation or so. . . . Now [Guns, Germs, and Steel] must be added to their select number. . . . Diamond meshes technological mastery with historical sweep, anecdotal delight with broad conceptual vision, and command of sources with creative leaps. No finer work of its kind has been published this year, or for many past.—Martin Sieff, Washington Times
[Diamond] is broadly erudite, writes in a style that pleasantly expresses scientific concepts in vernacular American English, and deals almost exclusively in questions that should interest everyone concerned about how humanity has developed. . . . [He] has done us all a great favor by supplying a rock-solid alternative to the racist answer. . . . A wonderfully interesting book.—Alfred W. Crosby, Los Angeles Times
An epochal work. Diamond has written a summary of human history that can be accounted, for the time being, as Darwinian in its authority.—Thomas M. Disch, The New Leader
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