Jared Diamond

"In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crises while adopting selective changes -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals...

The author answers the question: Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? He dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns.