Guns, Germs, and Steel

[Kuciwalker]

For my English and history courses (which are somewhat integrated) we're reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. I've already read it, and I think it's and AWESOME choice for integrated Enlish and history. I loved the book.

[Nubclear]

Great!

[MrFun]

fabulous book -- I own a copy myself

[Asher]

I like how he merges the motifs with a complacent blend of post-modern history with amicable animosity.

[Dis]

so much talk about this book

just give me the cliff's notes so I can get the jist of it

[Bosh]

Some good ideas, but the execution is a bit sloppy at times, with a lot of belaboring the obvious. You can tell that he isn't a trained historian. But the bit where he looks at where domesticated animals/plants come from and the conclusions he draws from that are pretty itneresting.

For a much better look at the germs bit of the three read Plagues and Peoples by Willian McNeill which is absolutely amazing.

[TCO]

1. Huge amount of repetition.
2. Politically correct (and silly) contradictory comments in the introduction (or is it first chapter?)
3. Used to advance a viewpoint but never proves that viewpoint. (i.e. proving significant cause from factor X, does not disprove significant cause from factor Y, especially in the social sciences where there is so much damn noise anyway.)
4. No footnotes. Pathetic. Lots of popular books have footnotes. Read A Beautiful Mind or The Bell Curve or On Modern War. These are all popular NYT bestseller nonfiction books. Full of footnotes.
5. (troll) Apppeals to pseudo-intellectuals and should never have gotten the Pulitzer. Very trendy and overrated.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by TCO
1. Huge amount of repetition.
2. Politically correct (and silly) contradictory comments in the introduction (or is it first chapter?)
3. Used to advance a viewpoint but never proves that viewpoint. (i.e. proving significant cause from factor X, does not disprove significant cause from factor Y, especially in the social sciences where there is so much damn noise anyway.)
4. No footnotes. Pathetic. Lots of popular books have footnotes. Read A Beautiful Mind or The Bell Curve or On Modern War. These are all popular NYT bestseller nonfiction books. Full of footnotes.
5. (troll) Apppeals to pseudo-intellectuals and should never have gotten the Pulitzer. Very trendy and overrated.

I agree with a lot of this, though I'm glad the book was written as it has stimulated a lot of discussion about history amongst people who normally never think much about it. Sometimes I think a Pulitzer prize is synonymous with sucks though. It's certainly a completely random prize, and means basically nothing insofar as deciding what might be of high quality or not.

[JohnT]

Chapter 1, TCO. He goes on and on about how you can't really compare IQ's across cultures and differing levels of "advancement", and then lays the following bombs on his reader:

In fact, as I shall explain in a moment, modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples. Paradoxical as it may sound... white immigrants to Australia do not deserve the credit usually accorded to them for building a literate industrialized society

...

From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, anc more interested in things and people around them than the average European and America is...

It is easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct... this effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners...

Hell, Diamond should've prefaced Chapter one with "I am not a racist, but..."

[Kuciwalker]

You obviously don't understand what he was saying. The immigrants to Australia obviously built a literate industrialized society, as they were the only one's with written language or industry!

[JohnT]

Likely... it's been a while since I've read the book and I just referenced the first chapter w/o going through the rest. But, still, it's a silly and inflammatory thing to say.

[Kuciwalker]

No it isn't. It's completely obvious. He then devotes the rest of the book to explaining WHY it was the immigrants that had the written word and industry.

[JohnT]

Now I'm confused. Diamond says in Chapter 1:

white immigrants to Australia do not deserve the credit usually accorded to them for building a literate industrialized society

And you say that Diamond argues later in the book that they do deserve the credit? Did they or did they not build a "literate industrial society"? If they did, Diamond's quote in chapter one is dumb. If they didn't (and the historical record does more than suggest otherwise), then Diamond is richly deserving of his Pulitzer and probably needs a few other awards as well for his total historical re-assessment of the causes of Australia's growth into a LIS.

[TCO]

He claims genetic mental superiority of New Guineans, then neglects to examine genetic intelligence patterns anyewhere else (and implicitly and certainly in terms of how people use his work) argues against any patterns of genetic intelligence difference by population.

[Kuciwalker]

No, he doesn't argue that they deserve the credit - he shows WHY they had a literate industrialized society and the aborigines didn't. He explains WHY Europe advanced further than other places, using simply geography and plant and animal stuff.