Jared Diamond is Professor of Physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Trained in physiology, he later took up the study of ecology and has made fundamental contributions to both disciplines. He is among the worlds leading zoologists and experts on birds. He has made many trips to the mountains of New Guinea to study their unique birds, rediscovered their long-lost bowerbird, and advises New Guinea governments on conservation. As well as writing technical articles in his many fields of interest, Jared Diamond writes regularly for popular science journals. He is married, and has twin sons.
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 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.
A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.
Winner of the Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.
A prodigious, convincing work, conceived on a grand scale 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 A book of remarkable scope… One of the most important and readable works on the human past 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 Fascinating, coherent, compassionate and completely accessible