Guns, Germs, and Steel Study Guide

Jared Diamond grew up in Boston and studied at Harvard, and later at Cambridge, where he obtained a doctorate in physiology. He taught physiology at UCLA for many years, while also pursuing his own interests in ornithology and ecology. Diamond published his first book in 1991: The Third Chimpanzee, on human evolution. Since the 90s, he’s published a series of successful books, few of which relate back to his academic field of study. His most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and is credited with popularizing the theory of geographic determinism: the idea that differences between civilizations have environmental causes. In the last decade, Diamond has been an important popular intellectual, penning articles on ecology, archaeology, and social science in many publications, and speaking at universities around the world.

It would be impossible to list all the historical events mentioned in Guns, Germs, and Steel—the entire book is about human history. However, there are two historical milestones that arguably stand out from all the rest: first, the development of agriculture 13,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, since it paved the way for civilization, political centralization, and the development of complex technologies; second, Columbus’s voyage to the New World in 1492, since it marked the start for European hegemony over the other civilizations of the world—in a way, the phenomenon that Diamond is trying to explain.

As a work of social science, Guns, Germs, and Steel has few overt literary influences. Nevertheless, with its macrocosmic scope and easy, readable style the book bears comparison with earlier works of social science like Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, which studies the structures of West Pacific societies, and Tristes Tropiques (1955) by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Both works use an expansive, literary style to study the differences between civilizations, even as they use scientific methods to do so. Diamond’s book also riffs on the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel Anna Karenina.