Volume 44, Number 8 · May 15, 1997
History Upside Down
By William H. McNeill
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond
Norton, 480 pp., $27.50
Guns, Germs, and Steel is an artful, informative, and delightful book, full of surprises for a historian like myself who is unaccustomed to examining the human record from the vantage point of New Guinea and Australia, as Jared Diamond has set out to do. The book is oddly titled, for Diamond has little to say about guns and steel, though he devotes a chapter to the role of germs in human history. A better title would be History Upside Down: A Biological View of the Human Past. But the author, a researcher in 'evolutionary biology and biogeography' specializing in birds, would surely object to such a description of his book, arguing instead that it is historians who err by approaching their subject downside up, thanks to their myopic concentration on literate societies and the last five thousand years of history. No matter: there is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of a subject, and that is what Jared Diamond has done.
Review, 3913 words
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