Guns, Germs, and Steel: Dear God, Let It End


There’s a scene in RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6 when a really bitchy queen, Gia Gunn, reads another contestant, a plus-sized Darienne Lake, by saying in a confessional, “There’s apparently room for everybody.”

That’s how I feel about Guns, Germs, and Steel, by JaredDiamond. There is apparently room for anybody to win a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, if this book can do it.

Diamond’s thesis is that Western Civilization hasn’t been a successful exercise in modernization (from automobiles to space missions) because we are inherently better than less sophisticated groups across the world. Instead, geography and the access it afforded people to grains and animals gave way to advanced technologies (guns and steel) and germs, as well as the antibodies for those germs. At its heart, the book is an argument against racist tendencies to attribute particular advancements to race.

Page after page, however, Diamond manages to be boring and pedantic. I felt like I was back in a college sociology class, looking past the stuffy writing to digest the interesting material. I don’t want that in my nonfiction reading these days. I was dying for a connection to a specific person, to an anecdote, instead I got chapter after chapter of dense material. I am not one to shy away from a nice text book, but this one masquerades as a piece of literature.

This was the hardest book for me to get through this year so far, and I do mean get through. I was able to do so because I am at least mildly interested in any writing that takes dots in human history and looks to connect them in new ways. This is not however, artful writing. I wish I could get back the time I spent with it.

Now, go back to the links above and read some social media from Gia Gunn or Darienne Lake. Any of that would be more fun than reading this book. 



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