RaveThe Washington Post... [a] fascinating and extremely important book. uns, Germs, and Steel is a volume no one should leave college without reading. The main argument, in simplified form, should be taught as early as grammar school. That its insights seem so fresh, its facts so novel and arresting, is evidence of how little Americans—and, I suspect, most well-educated citizens of the Western world—know of the most important forces of human history ... This synopsis, unfortunately, doesn\'t do credit to the immense subtlety of this book, which includes long sections about the use of linguistics to reach conclusions about ancient societies, employs knowledge gained from molecular biology and animal behavior to elucidate events otherwise lost to history, and recounts numerous mysteries about the course of human settlement ... Guns, Germs, and Steel is not without faults, although these are minor. There is a useful bibliographic essay at the end, but in a work with this heft it would have been nice to see footnotes or endnotes. Diamond tends toward the didactic. Parts of the book are repetitious. However, far more important than those quibbles—and actually far more important than the author\'s erudition—is Diamond\'s intellectual honesty.\
