Guus Bosman

This book, a Pulitzer Price winning publication by Jared Diamond, has gotten a lot of attention in the media. Recently the author wrote a book on the collapse of civilizations so Guns, Germs and Steel got some new publicity as well. I bought a hard cover version at Barnes & Nobles, because it's a book that I want to keep.

The main thesis of the book is how various civilizations in human history arose and how they gained and lost their power relative to other peoples. The author identifies the differences in geology between various continents and places in the world as a major contributor to those differences in power and development. For example, there were no big mammals in South America that could be domesticated and used to plough and do heavy duty work for humans. What's more -- living closely with animals has historically resulted in many diseases (influeza, smallpox etc) -- diseases for which the peoples that did not have these domesticated animals had no resistance, unliky Eurasians. The lack of good, easily domesticable plants, gave the South American empires another disadvantage.

The author has a very rich and broad knowledge of human history, writes well and makes a very convincing case for his theory. All this makes the book very much worth reading.