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书名：Guns Germs and Steel枪炮病菌与钢铁 
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1440L
作者：Jared Diamond
出版社名称：Vintage
出版时间：1998
语种：英文
ISBN：9780099302780
商品尺寸：12.9 x 3.1 x 19.8 cm
包装：平装
页数：496
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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies《枪炮、病菌与钢铁：人类社会的命运》是由美国加州大学洛杉矶分校医学院生理学教授贾德·戴蒙所著。这并不只是一本描述过去历史的书，而是在试图解释为何欧亚文明可以存活下来、并战胜其它文明的原因，同时驳斥欧亚霸权是由欧亚知识份子或道德上的优越而来。本书曾获得美国普利策奖以及英国科普书奖等诸多奖项。

WITH A NEW AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR
Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe?
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.
An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel remains a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science.

Review
"The most absorbing account on offer of the emergence of a world divided between have and have-nots... Never before put together so coherently, with such a combination of expertise, charm and compassion"(The Times)

"A book of remarkable scope... One of the most important and readable works on the human past" (Nature)

"A prodigious, convincing work, conceived on a grand scale" (Observer)

"This is the book that turned me from a historian of medieval warfare into a student of humankind"(Yuval Noah Harari Week)

"Fascinating, coherent, compassionate and completely accessible"(Sunday Telegraph)
为什么现代社会中的财富和权力的分配，是以今天这种面貌呈现，而非其它形式？为何越过大洋进行杀戮、征服和灭绝的，不是美洲、非洲的土著，而是欧洲人和亚洲人？各族群间的生活差异为何如此之大？对于现代人类、国家间的种种不平等现象，史学家往往存而不论，而在这部作品中，作者为许多大家熟悉以及想当然的答案赋予了截然不同的含义。

远古时期，各大陆上的人类社会的发展开始分道扬镳。中国、中美洲、美国东南部和其它地区对野生动植物的早期驯化，使这些地区的各个族群获得了一种优势。为什么小麦和玉米、牛和猪以及现代世界的其他一些“了不起的”作物和牲畜出现在这些特定地区，而不是出现在其它地区？人们对这个问题的理解至今仍停留在依稀隐约之间。诚然，农业与放牧出现在局部地区，只是对不同族群的不同命运的部分解释，重要的是，发展水平超过狩猎采集阶段的社会，就有可能发展出文字、技术、政府、有组织的宗教，同时也更有可能发展出凶恶的病菌和战争中的强大武器。正是这样的社会在海洋和陆地上进行冒险，以牺牲其他民族为代价，向新的家园不断扩张，人们熟悉的例子就是欧洲人在过去500年中对非欧洲民族的征服。开始时，这些欧洲人只是想通过航海去寻找贵金属和香料，结果却常常导致对土著人土地的入侵，并通过屠杀和带来的疾病大批消灭了土著居民。

在这部开创性的著作中，演化生物学家、人类学家贾雷德•戴蒙德揭示了事实上有助于形成历史广泛模式的环境因素，从而以震撼人心的力量摧毁了以种族主义为基础的人类史理论。本书是理解人类社会发展史方面的一个重大进展，它记录了现代世界及其诸多不平等所以形成的原因，也是一部真正关于世界各民族的历史，是对人类生活的完整一贯的叙述，具有很强的可读性。本书与戴蒙德的其他两部著作《崩溃》、《第三种黑猩猩》一起堪称为“人类大历史”。
贾雷德·戴蒙德（Jared Diamond，1937年9月10日－），出生于美国东部城市波士顿，美国演化生物学家、生理学家、生物地理学家以及非小说类作家，他著名的作品《枪炮、病菌与钢铁》获得美国普利策奖和英国科普图书奖。现任加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校医学院生理学教授，美国艺术与科学院、国家科学院院士、美国哲学学会会员，是当代少数几位探究人类社会与文明的思想家之一。

Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of TIME’s best non-fiction books of all time, the number one international bestseller Collapse and most recently The World Until Yesterday. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond’s work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.
Part One  From Eden To Cajamarca
Part Two  The Rise And Spread Of Food Production
Part Three  From Food To Guns, Germs, And Steel
Part Four  Around The World In Five Chapters
THIS BOOK ATTEMPTS TO PROVIDE A SHORT HISTORY OF EVERY-body for the last 13,000 years. The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different Continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren’t; as you will see, the answers to the question don’t involve human racial differences at all. The book’s emphasis is on the search for ultimate explanations, and on pushing back the chain of historical causation as far as possible.

Most books that set out to recount world history concentrate on histories of literate Eurasia and North African societies. Native societies of other parts of the world—sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Island Southeast Asia, Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands—receive only brief treatment, mainly as concerns what happened to them very late in their history, after they were discovered and subjugated by western Europeans. Even within Eurasia, much more space gets devoted to the history of western Eurasia than of China, India, Japan, tropical Southeast Asia, and other eastern Eurasian societies. History before the emergence of writing around 3,000 B.C. also receives brief treatment, although it constitutes 99.9% of the five-million-year history of the human species.
Such narrowly focused accounts of world history suffer from three disadvantages. First, increasing numbers of people today are, quite understandably, interested in other societies besides those of western Eurasia. After all, those “other” societies encompass most of the world’s population and the vast majority of the world’s ethnic, cultural, and liguistic groups. Some of them already are, and others are becoming, among the world’s most powerful economies and political forces.