Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond, 1997

Rating: 4/5

At the outset, let me warn you that this book is a laborious read - I had to alternate it with another "lighter" book while reading it. But, at the end, there is an incredible sense of achievement in the ability to understand human evolution better!

Jared Diamond is an enviable polymath - he has significant knowledge on multiple fields including anthropology, biology, ecology, and geography and puts together this knowledge in Guns, Germs and Steel for us to understand how humans evolved the way they did. He seeks to answer a question put to him by a politician acquaintance in New Guinea, basically, why human development occured at different rates on different continents. Or in other words, why didn't native Americans reach Europe and colonise it rather than the other way around. Diamond repeatedly makes the point that race had nothing to do with this. He attempts to answer this basic question over 500 pages, by discussing the history of human evolution, the progress of food production, the translation of that into guns, germs and steel (the building blocks that enabled some humans to develop faster than others) and then finally gives examples of such different rates of development across different parts of the world.

As to be expected with a book of this size exploring just a single question, parts of the book are dry to read and some parts are repetitive. The lack of the fifth star in the rating is simply on account of this. But the book succeeded in making me think of issues that I would never have and gives an entirely different perspective of commonly-held beliefs about human evolution. And during this journey, I picked up some fascinating pieces of information. For example, that the first cultivated plants in the Americas (bottle gourd) was not as food but as containers. Or that of the modern world's 6,000 languages, 1,000 belong to just New Guinea! All of this makes the book a satisfying read eventually.

Pros: Extremely informative, challenges commonly-held views about human evolution, interesting trivia

Cons: Laborious read, repetitive at parts