Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393069222
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
"Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history."—Bill Gates In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393069222
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 532

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history."—Bill Gates In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.

Europe and the People Without History

Europe and the People Without History PDF Author: Eric R. Wolf
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520268180
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
'The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.' (AMAZON)

Guns, Germs and Steel

Guns, Germs and Steel PDF Author: Jared M. Diamond
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099302780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
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

Inglis Diamond

Inglis Diamond PDF Author: Clive Michael Law
Publisher: Cobourg, Ont. : Collector Grade Publications
ISBN: 9780889352650
Category : Browning automatic pistol
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description


The World Until Yesterday

The World Until Yesterday PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101606002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 727

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Book Description
The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? “As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.

Gun Love

Gun Love PDF Author: Jennifer Clement
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
ISBN: 1524761680
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"Pearl's mother took her away from her family just weeks after she was born, and drove off to central Florida determined to begin a new life for herself and her daughter--in the parking lot next to a trailer park. Pearl grew up in the front seat of their '94 Mercury, while her mother lived in the back. Despite their hardships, mother and daughter both adjusted to life, making friends with the residents of the trailers and creating a deep connection to each other"--Amazon.com.

The Broken Gun

The Broken Gun PDF Author: Louis L'Amour
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553898949
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Ninety years ago the Toomey brothers, along with twenty-five other men and four thousand head of cattle, vanished en route to Arizona. When writer and historian Dan Sheridan is invited to the missing brothers’ ranch by its current owner, he jumps at the chance. The visit fits right in with his plan to solve the century-old mystery—but it turns out that his host isn’t a fan of books, writers, or people who don’t mind their own business. Soon Dan is living the dangers of the Old West firsthand—tracked through the savage wilderness by vicious killers straight out of the most violent pages of his stories. However, his enemies have made one serious mistake: Sheridan is no pencil-pushing greenhorn, and killing him won’t be as easy as they think.

The Diamond Empire

The Diamond Empire PDF Author: K'wan
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1250102642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
#1 Essence bestselling author K’Wan returns with The Diamond Empire, the explosive, hard-hitting follow-up novel to the street love story Diamonds and Pearl. It’s about to be an all-out war. While an ambitious rival has taken over Diamonds’s crew, Diamonds lies in wait in exile, carefully planning his next move to comeback and reclaim his position as king of the streets of New York for good. But when an unexpected enemy from the past one-ups Diamonds and beats him at his own game, Diamonds needs to dig deep into his bag of tricks—and make an unlikely alliance—in order to climb back to the top. After opening her heart to Diamonds and then having him disappear, Pearl lives her days in a very dark place. But when her father’s empire is toppled and a gaping power vacuum needs to be filled, Pearl is drawn into the very life her father so desperately wanted to shield her from. Pearl needs to fight tooth and nail to become queen of her father’s kingdom, as Diamonds claws his way back to Pearl.

Blood on the Stone

Blood on the Stone PDF Author: Ian Smillie
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857289632
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
'Blood on the Stone' is a gripping account of the cartel, warlords, gun runners and shadowy traders who populated Africa's bloody diamond wars, and the faltering, decade-long effort to clean up an entire industry.

The Secret of Our Success

The Secret of Our Success PDF Author: Joseph Henrich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178437
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.