Quote:
Originally Posted by orange
I've had this book for many years but finally got around to reading 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond. Very much enjoying it and it blends history, biology, agriculture, and other disciplines. The basic thesis is: Why didn't guns,technology, and more start in South America or other places instead of Eurasia?
I really enjoyed Sapiens and this is kind of similarly themed.
I'm going to try to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 'The Black Swan' for the 2nd time. I couldn't stand his writing before but I'll try to gut it out. I've heard many people enjoy his writing and work so there must be something to it.
diamond is a fantastic story teller but an extreme cherry picker of data - so much that there are a half dozen or so books written expressly to debunk his theories (but to be fair it's easier to sell your nonfiction if you market it as a good companion book to one of the all time best sellers)
i definitely subscribe to a lot of what gg&s advocates though
if you like that style, you'll probably really enjoy Andrade's Gunpowder Age and Frankopan's Silk Road as they both use snippets of history to attempt explaining the world in a manner you'd probably overlooked and they are very fascinating reads
Silk Roads - tells the story of how the rest of the world completely ignores central asia and yet a lot of world history was and culture was strongly influenced by places and events there
Gunpowder Age - starts off as a simple history of the development and transmission across the world of gunpowder but then dips it's toes into the great divergence and tries to explain how out of nowhere Europe rocketed to world dominance and places that were previously the wealthiest in the world became what is today the third world
I hated Sapiens, first 40 pages were amazing, next 100 or so pretty meh and by the end you could tell he was just filling content to make it marketable in book format - nearly everyone i know who says they loved it when I pressed them admitted they had only read the first few chapters