ABSTRACT
Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was born in Boston in 1937. He is an American evolutionary biologist, anthropologist, ecologist, and historian. He developed a passion for ornithology- the study of birds- and began visiting the South Pacific island of New Guinea regularly. Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question he was asked by Yali, the politician he met on one of his trips to New Guinea. When Guns, Germs, and Steel was published in 1997, it became an international phenomenon. It was awarded both the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, awarded to significant books in science. The book provides an introduction to the "comparative method" of history- the application of scientific reasoning to questions about historical causes.
