Recommendations you can check.
by Jared Diamond, 1999
Who uses, recommends or left Guns, Germs, and Steel, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
6 people
I still rank Guns, Germs, and Steel as one of the best things I’ve ever read.
Gates's 2019 summer reading list entry on Jared Diamond's Upheaval, looking back at his earlier book.
2019-05-20·gatesnotes.com ↗
The book is a masterpiece in terms of integrating a vast range of material from different disciplines, material on language, archaeology, comparative bio-geography, with also lots of his own ethnographic field studies peppered in there.
Five Books interview on cultural evolution
2016-10-13·fivebooks.com ↗
I have a soft spot for extremely broad histories like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World.
Five Books interview on the best economics books of 2022
2022-12-10·fivebooks.com ↗
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel
Kedrosky writes up the five books he chose for a Five Books interview on the Great Divergence.
2022-08-19·blog.daviskedrosky.com ↗
This is a really useful way of trying to figure out why different humans turned out the way they did, while considering the influences of technology and of the environment.
Five Books interview on books about the environment
2009-06-12·fivebooks.com ↗
Theory of history of human civilizations. This fascinating book explains why Eaurasians came to dominate most of the world, why native American, Australian, and sub-Saharan African peoples never had a good chance; and why European diseases decimated the native American population, but not the other way around.
On his public list of books he has read, with his notes.
2016-01-01·radex.io ↗
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.