It's an exciting and rare thing, so I love it when I find a book that takes theories from several various disciplines and blends them into a work that offers a totally new perspective on the world.
Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" is an inspired work that merges geology, archaeology, history, biology, agriculture and anthropology (am I missing anything?!) to offer a thorough, and thoroughly satisfying, answer to the fundamentally human question, "why do some societies on this planet have so much while others have so little?". As the title of the book suggests, it has a lot to do with the development of weapons, immunity (or lack thereof) from disease, and technological advancement. And in turn, those factors rest upon other matters, the most important being basic geography (is the soil fertile, are the crops and animals nutritious, are there plentiful natural resources, is the weather conducive to supporting varied types of plants and animals, etc.).
The research that went into this book is nothing less than a man's entire adult life. Diamond has traveled the globe in many capacities and has consulted with friends, colleagues, and the native peoples of various continents to piece his theories together. Like all truly great thinkers he has mixed science with creative insight to come up with a startling new way for us to understand our planet and the dramatically diverse human societies that have sprung up on it's surface to either prosper or wither.
Diamond won a Pulitzer for this book, and PBS created a three-part documentary based upon it, which can be viewed on their website at www.pbs.gunsgermssteel/.
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