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A friendly note to anyone going into it with no other info: Guns, Germs, and Steel reached the status of having its own wikipedia entry [0] and is very widely k

• kuhewa 3y ago
  Co-signed, worth reading but please don't quote the book at cocktail parties unless it is a claim you have independently (of the book) investigated
• freedomben 3y ago
  Yes absolutely, and thank you! Even as a lay reader (though I have read many other books and The Great Courses on similar material) there were several things I picked up on that are not scholarly at all. The most visible of which is the weird obsession the author has with repeatedly making sure that the reader knows that Europeans are not smarter than anybody else (though explicitly are less smart than Polynesians, an ironic contradiction to the author's own contention just a couple sentences prior that there are no intelligent differences among humans) and that any consideration whatsoever that different societies might have been different and made different choices with different outcomes, is utterly racist and unacceptable. It definitely struck me as very anti-science. But taken as a whole I enjoyed much about the book's approach and there are plenty of great things in there. And I would say about any book, definitely don't take anything as gospel. Always, always, read the criticisms and other discussions before just accepting things as "correct" simply because they were printed in a book.