Guns, Germs and Steel

This book 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 biography, 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.

Winner of Rhone Poulenc General Prize for Science Books 1998
Winner of Rhone-Poulenc Science Books Prize 1998

“A book of remarkable scope... One of the most important and readable works on the human past”

Fascinating, coherent, compassionate and completely accessible Sunday Telegraph This is the book that turned me from a historian of medieval warfare into a student of humankind -- Yuval Noah Harari Week A prodigious, convincing work, conceived on a grand scale Observer Nature 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

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 UntilYesterday. 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.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? Jared Diamond puts the case that 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 a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science. '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 '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