Guns, Germs and Steel

This book written by Jared Diamond was a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Chris' sister read it as required reading for one of her classes in med school and she thought it was very informative. She knows that I like history and suggested this book to me, then gave it to me for Christmas. The idea of the book is to answer the question: "Why did history unfold differently on different continents?" The author, a professor of geography who has spent many years on the island of New Guinea, takes 471 pages to show his expertise in native New Guineans. He also takes a very darwinistic view of how the human species developed and contradicts himself numerous times throughout the work. As I began to read the book and realized that I did not like the author's voice, I pushed myself to read more. I do not like to think of myself as someone who is narrow-minded and I am usually willing to listen and most times genuinely interested to other points of view. However, I could not ignore the fact that although the author states that he will examine this question through every aspect of human life, ie. biology, herbology, economics, politics, etc. He never once brings up the subject of religion and its effects on the history of the world. Now, whether or not a person believes in a religion is beside the point. Throughout the history of the world, most peoples and continents have acted on principles based solely on their religious beliefs. In fact, most of the wars and conquests the world have known, which have surely played a major role in the success of certain continents over the others, where based on some sort of religious principles. Therefore, I quickly found a work of literature that blatantly ignores the effect of religion on the people of history to be very narrow-minded and unfounded. In short, I had a hard time believing any of the assumptions the authors stated in this book and consequently stopped reading it. Not to mention that if all one has to do to win a Pulitzer these days is to summarize any high school history text book and then add in their own glorified personal travel log to the islands of New Guinea, I have completey lost any interest in reading works from future recipients of the Pulitzer Prize.

P.S. - If anyone wants to borrow the book, I will gladly remove it from my shelves to make room for other more worthy works of literature, like Captian Underpants or Diary of a Wimpy Kid perhaps.