Guns, Germs and Steel

I have always liked reading histories with a wide global sweep. The kind of history that one is trained at graduate school is what I call the miniscule school of history: a medieval count. a decaying castle, a bunch of worn out parchment and the like. While I do recognise that much of history is based on such painstaking research, I personally do not find such history terribly exiting. This is not to say that minute analysis of documents cannot be interesting. One has only to read the book by M T Clanchy, From Memery to Written Records to realise that medieval historiography can be as much of a paGE TURNER AS ANY CONTEMPORARY NOVEL.

I recently picked by Jared Diamond's Guns Grms and Steel in a bookstore that rightly calls itself landmark. I had read a review of his recent book Collapse in the Economist. Jared Diamond is an anthropologist probably teaching in one of the West coast Universities . This book is refreshing in that there is hardy any of the soul destroying jagon so dear the American anthropologists. In this Diamond is in good company: Marshal Sahlins learnt to write like a historian towards the fag end of his teaching career. If one reads his Stone Age Economics and compare the style with his Islands of History you can hardly believe that the same person wrote both books. However, Sahlins son Peter Sahins writes with elegance and polish and yes, Sahlins junior is a trained historian.

The basic theme of Jared Diamond in his Guns, Germs and Steel is simple. Mankind over a period of nearly a millennium learnt to remove the toxicity from a number of plasntsd by selective breeding and by carefully collecting the mutated grains. I was surprised to learn that the humble potato had once been highly toxic.In a similar manner human being too developed resistance to viruses. When the Spanish conquerors reached the so called New World they brought with them a whole range of new diseases for which them native peoples had no immunity. In the pan demics that followed the entire population was killed off. Is the AIDS virus something similar.