Guns, Germs, and Steel

Widely regarded as a polymath, Jared Diamond is most famous for a series of well-regarded, award-winning popular science books. Besides Guns, Germs, and Steel, the best known are The Third Chimpanzee (connecting human and animal behavior), Collapse (chronicling the self-inflicted reasons for the fall of societies), and Upheaval (analyzing how countries cope with or are destroyed by crises).

Diamond originally trained as a physician, but later became a renowned ornithologist, ecologist, and environmental historian. After a career teaching physiology at the UCLA Medical School, he became a professor of geography at UCLA and LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel, he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999, and was declared the ninth most influential public intellectual in a poll by Foreign Policy magazine.

Diamond spent a lot of time in New Guinea studying bird evolution. There, he met a local politician named Yali, who asked him a question that became the genesis for Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yali wondered why European colonizers were able to subjugate New Guinea, which was still under colonial rule. Yali noted that the colonists brought with them a variety of ‘cargo,’ including metal weapons, medicines, and clothing, so he asked Diamond, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (14).