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BarcodeComment: 2005-episode-july-diamonds-york-germs-1180365669
Worth watching more for the grains component than for the guns/germs components, September 5, 2005
Guns, Germs, and Steel
National Geographic: Guns, Germs & Steel Format: DVD Rating: Not Rated Genre: Documentary Year: 2005 Release Date: 2005-07-12 National Geographic: Guns, Germs & Steel available on December 27 2015 from Newegg for 26.99Based on Jared M. Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 480 pp., 32 pp. pls.), this July 2005 telecast (also available on DVD) received full and somewhat critical reviews by M. Balter in Science 309: 248-249 (8 July 2005) and by N. Martel in The New York times (11 July 2005).Suffice it to say here, the first episode is the best, and by far the most botanical, dealing with Diamond's controversial ideas on the origins of agriculture and domesticated plants and animals in the Near East and their global latitudinal (rather than longitudinal) spread. Episode 2 is a tad overkill, focusing almost entirely on that fateful November-1532 day when 168 Spaniards killed some 7000 unarmed Incas; smallpox was the cour de grâce for countless Incan survivors of the massacre, who lacked the resistance to the disease many Europeans had. Episode 3 deals with the European and Boer colonization of Africa...
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| Topic Title | Summary | Views | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Author: The Rocketman (Los Angel.. | First, if you taped this documentary off of PBS, keep your tape as the "extras" here are little more than a few facts spiffed up graphically over a world map.Diamond's thesis in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is that geography, which governs climate which, in turn, governs indigenous species, is the reason for the unequal distribution of wealth in the world today. In short, Diamond is focused on why the Europeans conquered so much of the world.There are 3 one-hour episodes in this series. The first is concerned with why agriculture took hold in parts of the world and hints at the benefits it bestowed in developing large, complex societies. The second episode is concerned with how these large complex (European) societies were able to develop weapons (guns and steel) to conquer much of the rest of the world. Germs were an unintended weapon against indigenous people that may have been the most beneficial. The last installment is concerned with another way to test... | 3 | |
| Author: John Kwok (New York, NY .. | Jared Diamond, a distinguished professor of physiology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted much of his life trying to understand man's impact on nature, through significant, often pioneering, work on bird species diversity in New Guinea, and the extinctions of endemic species of plants and animals in the aftermath of human colonization of the South Pacific by the ancestors of the Melanesians and especially, Polynesians. For this excellent work he has earned numerous accolades, including - if my memory is correct - membership in the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a superb writer and a mesmerizing lecturer; qualities which are shown in ample abundance throughout this National Geographic miniseries devoted to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Guns, Germs and Steel".Originally published back in 1997, "Guns, Germs and Steel" posed the interesting hypothesis that Western civilization's preeminence is due to mere... | 3 | |
| Author: Rudolf Schmid "nmnori" (.. | Based on Jared M. Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 480 pp., 32 pp. pls.), this July 2005 telecast (also available on DVD) received full and somewhat critical reviews by M. Balter in Science 309: 248-249 (8 July 2005) and by N. Martel in The New York times (11 July 2005).Suffice it to say here, the first episode is the best, and by far the most botanical, dealing with Diamond's controversial ideas on the origins of agriculture and domesticated plants and animals in the Near East and their global latitudinal (rather than longitudinal) spread. Episode 2 is a tad overkill, focusing almost entirely on that fateful November-1532 day when 168 Spaniards killed some 7000 unarmed Incas; smallpox was the cour de grâce for countless Incan survivors of the massacre, who lacked the resistance to the disease many Europeans had. Episode 3 deals with the European and Boer colonization of Africa... | 11 | |
