Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 transdisciplinary nonfiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations (including North Africa) have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures, and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.

Fear in Chile

Fear in Chile: Lives Under Pinochet
by Patricia Politzer

First-person accounts of life in Pinochet's Chile—"the perfect epitaph to a violent dictatorship" (Library Journal). "Like a García Márquez novel that has suddenly, horrifyingly, come to real life" (New York Newsday), Fear in Chile is an extraordinary collection of first-person accounts of life under dictatorship. In the 1980s, shortly after Chile emerged from one of the century's most notorious reigns of terror, Chilean journalist Patricia Politzer interviewed figures including a revolutionary activist, a military leader loyal to General Augusto Pinochet, a bank clerk concerned with the status quo, the mother of one of the "disappeared," as well as a dozen other men and women from every political position and social stratum of Chilean life. The result is a broad, vivid, yet nonideological view of modern life under military rule, about which Ariel Dorfman writes, "I can think of no better introduction to my country." With the October 1998 arrest of General Pinochet in Great Britain and renewed world awareness of the horrendous crimes committed during his regime, Fear in Chile, updated with a new afterword by the author that considers the recent attempts to prosecute Pinochet for human-rights violations, offers a vivid portrait of Chile's Pinochet era.

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

by Matthew Restall

The notion of some final and complete "Conquest" itself becomes one of the seven examples of the misconceptions and convenient fictions examined by Restall (Latin American studies, Pennsylvania State U.) in this exploration of the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Noting that the enduring historical myths about the Conquest are rooted in cultural conceptions, misconceptions, and political agendas of the Spanish, he uses Spanish, Native American, and West African sources to contest the ideas that the Spaniards exhibited some special exceptionalism and genius, that they were agents of the King of Spain, that colonialism was rapidly imposed, that the Spaniards acted largely alone, and that the Native Americans displayed little to no adaptability and ongoing vitality in the face of the Conquest.

According to historical consensus, the Spanish conquest of the New World was a cataclysm in which superior European technology and organization overwhelmed Native American civilizations. In this daring revisionist critique, Penn State historian Restall describes a far more complex process in which Indians were central participants on both sides of the struggle. Far from regarding the Spaniards as gods, Restall argues, Indians offered a variety of shrewd, pragmatic responses to the invaders while advancing their own political agendas. Indeed, given that the conquistadors were vastly outnumbered by their Indian allies, the Conquest was in many respects a civil war between natives. Nor did Indian societies fall apart at one blow: independent Mayan polities, for example, persisted into the 19th century. Even under Spanish rule, Indians continued to live in self-governing communities, where they maintained their own languages, cultures and leaders who had considerable clout with the colonial administration. Drawing on Spanish, Native American and West African accounts of the Conquest, academic studies and even Hollywood movies, Restall examines the paradigm of European triumph and Indian "desolation" as it evolved from the conquistador's self-serving narratives to contemporary interpretations by such writers as Jared Diamond and Kirkpatrick Sale. Rejecting the implicit juxtaposition of "subhuman" Indians with "superhuman" Europeans, Restall asserts instead that, through war and epidemic, native societies retained much of their autonomy and cohesion, and "turn[ed] calamity into opportunity." Restall's provocative analysis, wide-ranging scholarship and lucid prose make this a stimulating contribution to the debate on one of history's great watersheds.

The World

The World: A History: Combined Volume
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

The World gives students the whole story. It is a new kind of history text – not just a collection of facts and figures. World renowned historian, world respected scholar, successful author of more than 25 books translated into 22 languages, and exceptional writer, author Felipe Fernández-Armesto offers a truly holistic narrative of the world, from human beginnings to the present. All aspects of the text – from the exceptionally clear narrative that always places the story in time, to the unparalleled map program, to the focused pedagogical features – support the story. Because of the author’s breadth of vision, students will come away with a deep understanding of the fundamental interrelationships – among peoples and their environments – that make up the world’s story.

Developing a project like The World required the input of and counsel of hundreds of individuals. David Ringrose, respected World Historian from the University of California–San Diego, served as The World’s editorial consultant, and provided extensive teaching tips in the Instructor’s Guide to Teaching the World. Nearly 100 reviewers critiqued the manuscript, from the first edition to the final draft. Instructor focus groups were held throughout the country during the publication process.

"The Maya Collapses"

"The Maya Collapses"

from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

Who has looked on the ancient Maya or classical Mediterranean cities and not wondered why they were abandoned? Or whether they hold a message for us? In this fascinating book, Jared Diamond seeks to understand the fates of past societies that collapsed for ecological reasons, combining the most important policy debate of our generation with the romance and mystery of lost worlds. Citizens of first world societies look around and tend not to see signs of imminent ecological collapse: the supermarkets are full of food; water gushes from our faucets; we live amidst trees and green grass. Actually, though, many past civilizations — with far smaller populations and less potent destructive technologies than those of today — have inadvertently committed ecological suicide: the Polynesian societies on Easter Island and other Pacific islands or the Anasazi civiliation, for example.

Ecocide asks why some societies make disastrous decisions, and how can we in the modern world learn better problem solving? Ecocide is an ecological history of human societies that considers why societies in some regions have been more vulnerable than those in other regions, and also compares the trajectories of pastcivilizations with likely trajectories of our own. Why did Greenland fail where Iceland succeeded? What links Rwanda and Australia? What can contemporary Montana learn from the ancient Mayans and modern Chinese?

The Bad Girl

The Bad Girl
by Mario Vargas Llosa

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as “Lily” in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting “Comrade Arlette,” an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit n icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the ily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as—whether it’s Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO fficial, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman—and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her.

The protean Lily, gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse—does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is as unclear as what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate shadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. In Mario Vargas Llosa’s beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.

Inhuman Bondage

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
by David Brion Davis

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, David Brion Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. Now, in Inhuman Bondage, Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in this definitive account of New World slavery.

The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism in European thought. Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics, stressing that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation—not a marginal enterprise.

A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling portrait of the dark side of the American dream.

The Other Path

The Other Path : The Invisible Revolution in the Third World
by Hernando de Soto

Altering the way we perceive underdeveloped countries, this revolutionary volume focuses on Lima, Peru, and how its internal economies and political alliances function. De Soto also describes the surprising and revolutionary world of the "informals," those who work outside the law to achieve their goals.

The Fight Against Terrorism is not only military. In the long term, it is also -- perhaps even primarily -- economic. How do we create economic and social conditions in third-world countries that will prevent terrorist organizations and ideas from taking root? How do we give ordinary people in these countries better alternatives than supporting drug lords or terrorists? In the classic The Other Path, Hernando de Soto describes how he and his organization, the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, faced this problem in Peru in the 1980s -- and how they solved it. In a world in which the root causes of terrorism are once again a pressing concern, this book is more relevant than ever.

Of all the terrorist movements since World War II that had any realistic potential to form a national government, only one was decisively defeated on the battleground of ideas. Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, arose in Peru in 1980. It was distinguished by both the radicalism of its Maoist ideology and the viciousness of its tactics. An American diplomat, Bernard Aronson, called the Shining Path "the most murderous guerilla group ever to operate in the Western Hemisphere" and compared them to the Khmer Rouge. At one point this group commanded eighty thousand followers-two-thirds the size of Great Britain's standing army-and was the single largest political organization in the country.

The task of making the Shining Path politically irrelevant was accomplished primarily by ideological means. Hernando de Soto offered an alternative vision of Peru's poor. Rather than see them as the proletariat, he showed that they were in fact budding entrepreneurs whose greatest desire was not to bring down the market economy but to join it.

The River of Doubt

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
by Candice Millard

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

The River of Doubt-it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt's life, here is Candice Millard's dazzling debut.