I got that for R a few years ago and ended up reading it myself. It was quite good. I've wondered about his other stuff... But someone remind me, didn't he come up against some criticism recently. I think I read some controversy in Atlantic Monthly or Harper's where he was caught out fudging the data or some of his informants said that he was misrepresenting them or something? Anyone know more about the upshot of the controversy?
shag
^^^^^^^ CB: Guns, germs and steel didn't cause the differences in societies in the last 500 years. It was people, Europeans with capitalist ideology. The guns, germs and steel allowed them to conquer the world. The author is a biologist , who , not surprisingly devises another technological determinist, or vulgar materialist, and social darwinist theory of capitalism's history and of culture over the 10,000 years. It is an amateurish jumping into a discipline without any attention to the many already existing works in this important area of knowledge. It's "National Geographic anthropology" and touristic history.