I’ve recently been working my way through Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. It’s been hard work but worthwhile too. But let’s start at the beginning, before I start to whine too much. The book is an examination of human history since the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago. At that point, when humanity started to properly deviate from its ape ancestors and form civilisations and technologies, that things become interesting. Different peoples in different parts of the world developed at different rates. The middle east was the site of the first crop farming, while the same didn’t happen in the Americas for thousands more years. The Australian humans were still using stone-age technology when Europeans arrived a few hundred years ago. Guns, Germs and Steel is an attempt to examine what might have caused these disparities and to follow that line of reasoning.

The general conclusion is that people in different parts of the world were constrained by their geography. Why did the people in middle east get crop farming but the Australians not? Essentially, because there were more crops there to begin with. The ‘fertile crescent’ in the stretch of land from Turkey and Iran is vastly more hospitable to many types of life than Australia.

And so the reasoning follows from there. With crops and farming come the facility to support extremely large and sophisticated empires with specialised soldiers, craftsmen and bureaucrats. Elsewhere, peoples who subsisted on nuts and clams and berries could only support small family-tribes. At this level, there was no chance to develop the rich empires needed to fund the trappings of modern society. It’s just like a game of Civilisation, innit?

But back to the whining. The ideas in this book were fascinating. There was a lot of interesting stuff about the development of dangerous diseases, which I would never have even guessed at. But eventually you realise that the book has fully explained the thesis and is just ploughing through page after page — and chapter after chapter — of examples. And that does get really dry, especially with the author’s writing style which involves asking lots of rhetorical questions. It makes one feel like the classroom know-it-all who gets ignored by the teacher, even though they strain and stretch their arm in the air. “Me, me! I know! You told me in the first half of the book!”

So I have to confess I’ve given up with at least a chapter to go. I don’t often do this. I mean, he might turn round and say “actually, I was just kidding…”. But there are more tempting books waiting in my pile right now, so Mr Jared Diamond is going to find himself back on the shelf.