I read this book purely for pleasure, unlike a lot of people I know who have read it for class or as part of an academic exercise. I simply like to pick a book that will challenge me in between fiction books. This book did not disappoint.

This is a rare work in that it can appeal to academics and pleasure readers. The knowledge and research behind the concepts in the book are complex and detailed, but Diamond does such an excellent job of explaining things, that you can easily sometimes forget the vast amount of information that he had to assimilate in order to put forth this hypothesis.

There are also two main points from the book that I took. One is the merely academic and scientific data that you learn from the book. I do not have a science, anthropologic, or linguistic background, so I learned a great deal from this book. But secondly, there is a very clear goal of this book to discount the foundations of racism. This is a lesson that every reader from this book can take with them and actually use in real life. I was struck at how this book can have such a dual purpose, and this makes it truly unique in my opinion.

Sure, there are vast generalizations that are made in a work such as this, just as there are in any history book, but this book has excellent points, is well researched, and makes solid arguments. I would definitely read another book by Jared Diamond and will definitely not forget the lessons I learned in this book.

If you have curiosity about how the big picture of civilizations emerged - for example, why it was the European civilizations dominating with ships and guns and not the American civilizations - you should really enjoy this book. Yes, Jared Diamond has biases (he clearly doesn't like people who believe whites are genetically superior to other races) but he weaves a fantastic story with scientific facts and elegant reasoning. Many facts (relating to plant and animal science) are clearly and concisely presented. Other facts are obvious once pointed out (the lack of domesticatable animals in sub-Saharan Africa, or how long it takes for domesticated plants to adjust to different climates) you have these great "Aha" moments while reading. I loved how his arguments came together.

Are there cons? Well, certain chapters in the second half of the book do repeat parts of the first half. It adds to the clarity (showing how the same principles can apply to different parts of the world), but if you "got it" the first time, some parts of the book can get long. Given how this book can change the way you look at different peoples and cultures, I can forgive him for repeating himself.

If you like science and are curious about how environment shaped, or better, limited civilizations, get this book.

Because a new crop of bushy tailed Ivy League students are sure to be required to pick up a copy of this book before their orientations, before even being allowed on campus, there are a few things that you should know about this book before you do start.

Even though there are plenty of wild pigs in New Guinea, which could have been domesticated at any time during the last 100,000 years, Jared Diamond describes the natural fauna in New Guinea as if it were the most protein deficient wasteland on earth. No protein, hmmmm, what could this mean? Why, those poor people!

And even though you would think that this work might lose all credibility if when discussing human cultures, he were to leave out such a grossly significant fact, as the observation that the rugged terrain of the thousands of square miles of the New Guinea highlands is most well known, among educated people, as the home of a people that have been nothing for thousands of years but stone age men without a written language, or any metal tools, but with a human bone or a nasal shell through their septum because they are the world's most feared cannibals.

Yet not one word will you find in this book about that, but with a subtle nod of Jared's head for those in the know, wink wink, that oh, their natural diet has no protein. So, of course, the same trade routes and tasty plants that led other peoples to great things, through no fault or effort of their own, left these poor people in New Guinea very hungry. Very hungry for protein!

You will kill anyone who disagrees with you, by the end of this great work, about the fact that all cultures just have different ways of solving the same universal problems, like protein deficiency for example. And that socialism and capitalism and communism and cannibalism are all just different ways of accomplishing the very same things. Except for capitalism, of course, which is grossly unfair to the poor and to be despised!

You will always have a warm feeling in your stomach, as well, at the secret thoughts that you will imagine that you only realize to yourself after reading this book, about how white boys aren't really anything special after all, despite what you had previously been tricked into believing, in how they just happened to find themselves on east west trade routes near plants that just happened to contain protein.

Of course, you will find many other new ideas in this book, such as Jared Diamond's suggestion in the introduction, that Western civilization encourages white boys to pass on their genes, no matter how intellectually deficient they might be, because Western civilization makes so few demands upon its citizens. Which is why you must be given this book to read even before your orientation, while you are still unlearned enough to not even know about the famous conch shell collecting New Guinea cannibals.

Which civilization will be more productive, technologically advanced and ultimately politically dominant: a hundred ethnicities lined up East to West; or a hundred ethnicities arrayed North to South? This, in essence, is the compelling and original question that Jared Diamond asks, and answers, in this absolutely required-reading 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner.

On page 87, the chart entitled "Factors Underlying the Broadest Pattern of History" outlines Diamond's entire case. Due to weather patterns, continental shape, and topographical variation, the band of cultures arranged along the Eastwest axis from Portugal to Vietnam had a superior starting point compared to those cultures stretching Northsouth from Alaska to Chile or from the Sudan to South Africa.

As humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers, food surpluses enabled for the first time a segment of society to do something other than scrounge for their next protein hit. Increases in food storage and food production enabled ever greater specialization: "stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest; artisans such as metal workers, who develop swords, guns and other technologies and scribes, who preserve far more information than can be remembered accurately." New technologies are produced by this thinking-inventing class; both by trial and error and by sustained experimentation, new methods, inventions, processes, weapons, and philosophies are brought forth into the world.

By showing that innovations occur, independently, in every race and culture -- "the myriad factors affecting innovativeness make the historian's task paradoxically easier, by converting societal variation in innovativeness into essentially a random variable" - Diamond is able to sidestep charges, should one be so inclined (and many ones are inclined so) of racial determinism.

So in each of these areas, as societies independently produce innovations in guns, germs or steel, they share or trade them with their neighbors. For the Eastwesters, this is easy because the climate from Portugal to Vietnam is rather similar, broadly speaking. For the Northsoutherners, however, the crops and mammals that thrive in the American plains or the Andes wither in the Guatemalan heat and vice versa. Therefore, trade and the exchange of ideas are hampered.

And thus, geography is destiny.

The wheel, invented by the Eastwest crew in 3,000 BC diffuses rapidly within a few centuries. Invented independently in prehistoric Mexico, it never makes it to the Andes (Diamond cites the throttling power of the narrow Panama isthmus, though I wonder why does a narrow landmass throttle diffusion and not accelerate it?) In another example, writing zips rapidly across Eurasia while it languishes with the Mayas in the Americas.

Similarly, with food: "of the world's 148 big wild terrestrial herbivore mammals - the candidates for domestication - only 14 passed the test. Why did the other 134 species fail?" Eurasia ends up with 13 of them, the Americas 1, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia - zero

And as a result of food - disease. Eurasian crowd diseases evolved out of the diseases of Eurasian herd animals. And a lack of these mammals in the New World led to a paucity of disease (the author includes an interesting sidenote on why llamas are not a source of human disease). Most wars prior to World War II were won by the side spreading nastier germs (a novel and not entirely convincing argument - were the Mongols, with their small core of Mongolians surrounding by an ever-expanding army of conscripts, really able to direct their germs at the enemy and not their own troops?) And European diseases eliminated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas within two centuries of arrival.

So geography is destiny and in the area of invention, food, and disease, Eastwest orientation is superior to Northsouth.

Even within Eastwest, we find geography has implications:

"Europe has a highly indented coastline with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation [and thus] Europe is carved up into independent linguistic, ethnic and political units by high mountains"

While "China's coastline is much smoother" with no bifurcating ranges separating tribes and generating animosities, dialects, separate ethnic identities, or, importantly, sharable innovation.

Call this Diamond's Contiguous China theory: Europe's disunity leads to experimentation (Columbus asks five different regents to support his voyages before one will support him) while the Chinese monolith ends its voyages of discovery in 1421 due to court intrigue.

Perhaps Diamond's Contiguous China theory has implications for writing systems as well. Writing always starts as pictographs. In the Mediterranean, these symbols, forced into contact with many different pronunciations, syllables, diphthong and accents lost all but their most basic phonemic essence. "Alphabets apparently arose only once" in Syria and were then borrowed, copied, co-opted and diffused throughout the Eastwest axis. While Chinese characters, which gradually expanded along with the monolithic linguistic-political area (even though ultimately that monolith sprouts wholly different languages, the process is gradual enough to not rupture the writing system in the interim) had no such stripping away. And thus Chinese has several thousand characters, each idiosyncratically replete with meaning; while the few dozen Western characters are meaningless of themselves and merely phonemic.

Perhaps the best evidence of Diamond's deftness of touch is the complete absence of opprobrium for the author since publication of what is after all, an explanation of why Europeans and Asians succeeded and Africans and Native Americans didn't. Even rational, dispassionate treatises on topics tangentially touching race tend to produce a singular level of venom and vitriol from the shouting classes. Diamond so smoothly handles these sensitive issues, head on, that there is simply no race-baiting angle from which to attack him.

Indeed, the differences in outcome are attributed not to race, ethnicity, genes, culture or any other factor inherent to these groups at all, but rather surprisingly and benignly, to the geographical orientation of one's neighbors! A more arbitrary, non-threatening explanation for observed differences in national success would be difficult to conceive. And for that, the modern, liberally minded student, the originality, rigor, scope and truth of Diamond's thesis is all the sweeter.

Geography is destiny is the moral of this book. At the beginning he relates a question posed to him by a New Guinea native: Why is it that the whites have all the cargo [technology] and his compatriots don't?

Diamond boils it down to four key issues: the availability of plants and animals to be domesticated, the ease with which this domestication can be transferred (east-west being easier than north-south due to similar climates), isolation, and the size of the population. What we call western civilization emerged in the fertile soil of southwestern Asia, with a host of available plants and animals for domestication. It then spread rapidly along the east-west axis of Eurasia. This reliance on farming made a dense population possible, which along with the proximity of the domesticated animals led to a host of endemic diseases. These diseases, when brought to the Americas, did more to subjugate the natives than either the guns or the steel of the title.

This thesis is explained in detail, first in overview and then with the quick example of the Polynesian islands. Part two of the book covers food production and the domestication of animals. Part three expands by covering the increase in disease and the spread of writing and technology based on the previous principles. And the final part provides a quick investigation of five parts of the world that demonstrate how geography affected their inhabitation and culture.

It's a powerful and persuasive thesis, though Diamond admits that further investigation is needed.

His prose is straightforward if somewhat rhetorical. He hews very closely to the advice that a writer should tell you what he's going to tell you, tell you, then tell you what he's told you. He's also quite fond of rhetorical questions, though this seems a useful device in this context.

Overall, it's a fascinating and thought-provoking book, and includes an extension section on recommended further reading--all of which sound very interesting as well!