Guns, Germs, and Steel Critique

Guns, Germs, and Steel Essay Guns, Germs, and Steel is an amazing book. When I first looked at it I told myself I would never be able to read it because it was so big, but I knew I had to.

By the title I thought it was going to be about the Civil War. When I began reading Yali’s question I realized that it was about early civilizations and their advancements. When I started reading the book it was very boring and I didn’t know how I was going to finish it. As I got to around page 75 I began to understand the book and got interested in it.After page 100 I was glued to the book. It had so much information in it that I didn’t know and I wanted to keep on reading.

When I picked up this book I thought it was going to be about the Civil War because of the title. I thought this because during the Civil War there were advancements in guns, many germs were spread, and the steel industry took off around that time. When I told my dad about the title he said that it was about early civilizations and the inventions of guns and steel and the discovery of germs.I thought that maybe he was right, but I figured that I would find out by reading the book.

While I was reading Yali's question I finally realized that it was about early civilizations and there advancements. Yali's question was extremely interesting and very appropriate for the situation. Before I read the book I thought that New Guinea advanced at the same rate as Europe and other Middle Eastern countries. I did not realize that they had such basic ways of living when other people were more sophisticated than ever.

His question brings up a very good point.Why did the white people have so much cargo and they had so little? I think the answer is the New Guineans had their ways of living that worked for them and they didn't need to be changed. The white people had to change their ways of living to fit their environments and also had to deal with the threat of other countries. New Guinea was a secluded island that traded very little so they had nobody to war with.

This was very beneficial as they could focus on getting food and governing their people. My favorite chapter was Chapter 11:The Lethal Gift of Livestock.I liked it a lot because I learned a lot of diseases that livestock carried that I never would have thought of. Some of them are ones that I already knew, but I never would have guessed that monkeys carried AIDS or that tuberculosis came from cattle. I knew that many diseases were spread back then, but I thought they were from people and not livestock. I didn't know about the diseases that livestock carried because now we have vaccines to protect from these diseases and very few people get them from livestock.

It is fascinating how much of an impact these diseases could have on entire populations. The book said that some diseases wiped out as many as 95% of a whole population! I have to say that this book was one of the best I have ever read. Most people I have talked to said they hated it, but there was just something about it that caught my interest. It started off very slow but as it progressed I got hooked. I was amazed at the amount of information that the author was able to fit in a 400 page book.

Some books are 1000 pages on just one of the subjects that is discussed in this book. I would rate this book, on a scale of 1 to 10, a 9. The only reason it doesn't get a 10 is because it was hard to understand in some sections. The author used a very wide vocabulary, and I understood most of it, just not all of it.

There were only a few things in the book that I thought were wrong, but it could have just been that I thought wrong. Overall, this is a great book based purely on facts that everybody should read.