United States
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Reissued as part of Vintage's Patterns of the Planet series.
Guns, Germs and Steel answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.
An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most important and humane works of popular science.
Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of TIME's best non-fiction books of all time, the number one international bestseller Collapse and most recently The World Until Yesterday. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.
"Monumental and monumentally good"
– William Leith, 4 stars Scotsman
"A book of big questions, and big answers"
– Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens
"A book of remarkable scope [...] One of the most important and readable works on the human past"
– Nature
"Fascinating, coherent, compassionate and completely accessible"
– Sunday Telegraph
"A prodigious, convincing work, conceived on a grand scale"
– Observer
"The most absorbing account on offer of the emergence of a world divided between have and have-nots [...] Never before put together so coherently, with such a combination of expertise, charm and compassion"
– The Times
"Diamond's sideways-on view of human development may well establish its author as one of the very few scientists to have changed the way we think about history"
– Sunday Telegraph
