by Jared Diamond, first published in 1997 this edition has an afterword published in 2004, W.W. Norton & Company

This book was interesting for me to read, although a bit of a chore.  The work is very repetitious and sometimes downright boring.  At other times it was very interesting and the author asked and asnwered some very provocative questions, the main one being how did we get to where we are from prehistoric times.

I can’t recall a book that provided so much information in a concise manner.  On the other hand, I can’t recall a book that seemed so repetitious.  This is a strange conundrum.

The theories that the author proposes seemed, for the most part,  very logical and well stated but I finished the book with a suspicion that he provides only a part of the story and the part he provides is the part that fits in with his theories.  I was cruising along and accepting his logic until, all of a sudden, he stated that there were too many variables contributing to the spread of technology that the answer was that it was random.  After spending so much time articulating how the domestication of plants and animals occured and then outlining the origins of written language, he gets to technology and finds a whole bunch of reasons so he states it must be random!  So much for the scientific method and its application to history.

Diamond’s approach certainly has merit and holds out promise.  I just don’t think he has accounted for all the proximinate and ultimate causes of how we got to where we are.  Another book I read, The Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, deliniates some of the environmental factors that contribute to success.  That book seems to drill down into the factors that cause sudden technological advances to a much better extent than Guns, Germs and Steel.

In the end, I am glad that I slogged through this as it caused me to think a lot on human develoopment and gave me a lot of information I didn’t know before.  I don’t feel, however, that the ques