In the article, [Expletive Deleted] Jared Diamond, Corriea’s review wasn’t the best review. He shows a different viewpoint on mankind, and I take Diamond’s side. Let’s start off with Corriea’s review. Corriea doesn’t really like the book because, “At worst, it develops an argument about human inequality based on a determinist logic that reduces social relations such as poverty, state violence, and persistent social domination, to inexorable outcomes of geography and environment” (1). Corriea believes that the points Jared Diamond make just cause a bigger argument and doesn’t really focus on other issues except human inequality. He also mentioned in the article that he viewed a lot of racism while reading the book and for me personally, I can …show more content…
Further into the article, he starts talking about the climate and collapse of past civilizations, “Collapse and climate may indeed be linked, but these efforts, as with Diamond, ignore patterns of social response to climate change and how these political and social struggles over resources produced uneven patterns of development and inequality” (4). He starts talking about climate of course but then backlashes at “Guns, Germs, and Steel” again because they ignored this point. Correia obviously has a different point of view from Jared Diamond and sees things from a different perspective, but then again Jared Diamond does avoid some topics in the book. He always goes back to talking about civilization and more importantly he brings up a lot of geography. Let us go back to beginning now where he opens up this article with talking about how Jared Diamond doesn’t have any supporting points, “At best it is just silly, as when he offers unsupported, and unsupportable, assertions such as his get-off-my-lawn grouse that children today are not as smart as in the recent past and television is to blame” (1). Right off the bat, Corriea disses Jared Diamond for his invalid and unreasoning points in his book and how he just assumes
constant comparison and view of blacks vs. whites in the novel. “ To show too much intelligence
Jared Diamond author of “The Ends of the World as We Know Them” highlights the reasons for the disappearance of early civilizations. Civilizations like the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs once inhabited the earth for hundreds of years, However; when these advanced civilizations reached the pinnacle of their capability, they faced tragedies such as war, unusual weather, environmental deprivation, terminated trade markets and unscrupulous leaders who contributed to the destruction of their civilization. One significant idea portrayed from Diamond’s article is that there are many factors that threaten American civilization. America is threatened by the destruction of their own environment.
Jared Diamond begins Guns with a prologue which sets the stage for the rest of the book. Approached in New Guinea by his friend and local politician Yali, he is posed a question: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Yali's question flared a nerve in Diamond. This question brought about the thesis of his book, that environment is more persuasive on development of civilization than people may have once thought.
In conclusion, throughout this book race takes on many different shapes, forms, and ideas. Let us not forget that racism not only exist in our community, but all around the world. Dalton Conley does a wonderful job explaining how just because you might not think something good can come out of something bad, doesn't' mean it can't.
...int he had before elaborating on his main idea. One thing that I really liked in the book was the beginning of the chapter Zebras and Unhappy Marriages. Diamond starts the chapter with “Domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.”(Diamond 157) This sentence is based of off the famous first sentence of Tolstoy’s novel Ana Karenina. I thought that this was a clever way to start the passage and catch the reader’s attention. However, the issue I had with the book was that it was repetitive. Jared Diamond would reiterate what he had already stated earlier in the book or passage. Overall the book was well organized and well written. Jared Diamond clearly stated his thesis more than once throughout the book. He elaborated on every point he made and did a good job in convincing the reader of his standing on the topic.
This is my personal reflection about this book. First and foremost, I would like to say that this book is very thick and long to read. There are about nineteen chapters and 278 pages altogether. As a slow reader, it is a quite hard for me to finish reading it within time. It took me weeks to finish reading it as a whole. Furthermore, it is written in English version. My English is just in average so sometimes I need to refer to dictionary for certain words. Sometimes I use google translate and ask my friends to explain the meaning of certain terms.
However, due to its stark and chaos-ensued exploration of human nature, it’s been quite controversial with it’s central theme of putting yourself before the common good. Other themes include conflict between civilization, the human impulse to control others, and living by the rules peacefully and in harmony. The book has thus made it’s home at number eight on the American Library Association’s list of frequently banned classic...
Criticisms (Unfavourable): Near the end of the book the dialogue becomes more rhetorical than the rest of the book. This isn’t really a problem, but can become slightly confusing at times. The best option would be to read this part slowly and carefully in order to understand what the message is.
Staples’ claim is made clear through the series of chronological anecdotes that make up his essay. The snippets of his life range from a short story about crossing a street at night in Chicago to being mistaken for a burglar while rushing into his office to turn in a deadline story - all because of the color of his skin. The anecdotes in his essay are meant to show the reader what to believe instead of merely telling them. Staples has a clear reason for writing and has strong beliefs about racism, however the stylistic devices he uses are meant to guide the reader into developing their own opinion on racism, which Staples in turn knows will persuade. Instead of stating his biased opinion from the start, he invites the reader in through his stories, even though the images themselves are hard to stomach. Staples wisely avoids a...
The author presented the information in a very solid way and sectioned it out very well. I understood what he was trying to explain. It was somewhat a long book but very much full of knowledge and history that in spirit is still alive today. We may not have slavery like it was then, but we still deal with racism and prejudice daily.
Throughout multiple instances in the book, Tom blurts out rather racist ideology. For instance, on page 13 he states, “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control
He develops an important argument about the “origins of the third world” (p. 279). The late nineteenth century’s ENSO droughts were no mere footnote. Rather, ENSO-driven climate change intersected with a century-long erosion of pre-capitalist state structures and the simultaneous expansion of commodity production and exchange, especially in South and East Asia. Famine and ecological crisis ensued, their lasting effects found in today’s extreme global inequality. Davis says that “The wealth generated by usury and rack-renting was almost entirely parasitic, with negligible productive reinvestment in cattle, irrigation or farm equipment” Davis, Mike (2002-06-17) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (pg.318). He seems to be saying that political ecology offers a holistic approach and sees the individual as responsible, but with a nod to the influence of geopolitics. The political element of the equation is all the more important when you realize that in the Third World, poor also means, poor in
The novel Upside Down, by Eduardo Galeano depicts the injustices and unfairness of several branches of the global society. The differences between the colonized and the colonizer as Galeano writes is always growing and so is the gap between rich and poor. The author challenges western and eurocentric minds as to why on average, countries in the northern hemisphere have a higher standard of living than countries in the southern hemisphere. At first as a reader I thought the writer was whining about the unfairness of the world, but it is the social opiates such as the false idea of capitalism and choice that keeps us in check in this so called democracy. The author forces the reader to open their hearts to a concept that today's capitalist, power hungry society has almost forgotten
In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” he begins with “…the proposition that anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” With this initial statement, Chakrabarty declares that the advent of manmade climate change in the anthropocene, humans can no longer be considered separately from nature as they had been previously segregated by Enlightenment and western thinking. In other words, “humanism,” or human-centered thinking is neither relevant nor reasonable in the face of global climate change. According to Chakrabarty, since human and natural history are both intrinsically tied together, the fate of mankind is now
Rereading the novel, however, also triggered the silencing of my initial response.... ... middle of paper ... ... Just as I do not wish to represent my entire race in my every action, I should not expect a black woman, an African woman, or a woman of any other race to do the same.