HISTORY BOOK CLUB

"I'm so thrilled to get the History Book Club up and running again!"
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That quote is from our new leader, Tanya, who has volunteered to lead our discussions. We had several months of interesting, thought-provoking and lively discussions in the past with Milan's choices and I look forward to more of the same with Tanya. They definitely won't be dull!
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The selection for July is Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.
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"Why did the Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for histories broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life even more intriguing and important than accounts of dinosaurs and glaciers.The story begins 13,000 years ago, when the Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, paths of development of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the southeastern US, and other areas, gave peoples of those regions a head start. Why wheat and corn, cattle and pigs, and the modern world's other "blockbuster" crops and livestock arose in those particular regions and note elsewhere was, until now, but faintly understood.Societies that advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage were more likely to develop writing, technology, government, organized religions - as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war.A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be."
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Tanya says this book was given to her by a friend wishing to,” increase the number of Pulitzers” on her list of books read. "I’ve been saving it, hoping we could cover it as a book club! This is an ambitious book. I don’t believe any one person can comment on all of it with equal authority. I am certain, however, that it’ll spark great discussions around the table!"
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We decided to split this book into two discussion times. The first session we'll discuss up to Chapter 10 "Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes". The second session will be to finish off the book.

Please join us for the discussion of this selection on July 23rd at 7:30 p.m. in the B&N Cafe.

Jane