It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Guns, Germs and Steel

Guns, Germs and Steel

(Patterns of Life)

Summary


Read this specially designed new edition of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of what makes us human.

Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel remains a groundbreaking and humane work of popular science.

PATTERNS OF LIFE: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKS

Reviews

  • Monumental and monumentally good
    William Leith, 4 stars, Scotsman

About the author

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the seminal million-copy-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of Time magazine's best non-fiction books of all time, Collapse, a No. 1 international bestseller, and The World Until Yesterday, among other books. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.
Learn More

More in this series

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more