The book is a bit ore dry than the documentary -the documentary is a must see. The book may not appeal to a wide audience given the leve of detail he goes into listing crops, cattle and climate to sustain his thesis.
Jared Diamond deserves a lot of credit for two number of reasons:
1. He did asks the right question, why some cultures /nations prevail in the modern world while others didn't?
2. He takes a very creative and convincing way to go about answering that.
I was already fammiliar with his thesis because of the documentary, so in that sense the book didn't gave much new. But I have to say that when he talks about mankind going from nomad to sedentary, then to form villages, and eventually kingdoms, he does stop to observe that we all believe that this was the natural course of events, that humans were meant to do so and the path that leads to cities and civilization was natural. I got the same feeling that I got when looking at the buildings in Egypt, chaos is for granted, civilization isa miracle.
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