PositiveThe New York Review of BooksGuns, Germs, and Steel is an artful, informative, and delightful book, full of surprises for a historian like myself who is unaccustomed to examining the human record from the vantage point of New Guinea and Australia, as Jared Diamond has set out to do ... there is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of a subject, and that is what Jared Diamond has done ... No one can doubt the general accuracy of Diamond’s account of the environmental differences that he makes so much of. Yet one can doubt whether there was not greater scope for what I would call \'cultural autonomy\' than is allowed by Diamond’s effort to reduce (or raise?) history to the level of the biological sciences ... Diamond’s effort to make human history \'scientific\' by emphasizing the tyranny of natural environments while neglecting the way diverse symbolic worlds shape and reshape human societies and their physical environments thus seems misguided ... I do not accept Diamond’s dismissive appraisal of \'cultural idiosyncrasies unrelated to environment.\' A more persuasive view might be to suppose that in the early phases of our history, when technical skills and organizational coordination were still undeveloped, human societies were indeed closely constrained by the local availability of food, as Diamond convincingly argues ... Once again, much of what Diamond has to say in these chapters was entirely new to me.\
