Guns Germs And Steel Book Report

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond In 1972 while Jared Diamond, a biology professor from UCLA, was in New Guinea conducting research on tropical birds, he met a local politician named Yali. Yali started the conversation by questioning Diamond on goods brought to New Guinea from Europeans such as steel, food or clothing. He then proposed a question to the American professor regarding the comparison between the two countries. Yali asked, “Why is it that your white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (Diamond 14). This question triggered Diamond to search for an answer to Yali’s question about the dominance of the white race throughout history. In this book, Diamond displays his belief that agricultural and environmental, as well as geographical aspects played a vital role in the successful development of countries, as opposed to the most commonly referred reason, intellectual racism. Intellectual racism stems …show more content…

Coming from my background of not knowing an excessive amount on the development of society, Diamond does a fantastic job of explaining key features throughout the book and how they ultimately led to Yali’s answer. The issue of intellectual racism and how some societies are more successful than others is still a very relevant issue in today’s world. Diamond also explains his thoughts by using objective facts, then explaining them in his thoughts. Guns, Germs, and Steel can summarize historical events for the past 13,000 years and still have them be relevant to today. In conclusion, the differences in societies on different continents can be traced back to the ecology. This contradictory statement can be explained by how complex societies have organized politics, advanced technology, and successful food

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