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. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Five Books to Escape into while Social Distancing

Maybe one day soon a headline will read, “Out of Netflix Content, More People Turn to Books for Relief.” If you’re already ready for some literary escapism, check out these five books I read and loved in 2019. Hopefully they help you in this difficult time: The Storm King , Brendan Duffy. This book has many things that would make me not choose it as a Top Five: a straight male hero; not many strong female leads; privileged men acting out their privilege. Alas, it sucked me in with a short, strong opening chapter that set the tone and the mystery for the rest of the book. Duffy’s writing is a bit dramatic at times, but that’s also what kept the pages quickly turning. You can check out my review here . The Soul of an Octopus , Sy Montgomery. Montgomery ’s beautiful work in The Soul of an Octopus gives us hope about the connectivity between living creatures. Introducing the reader to several octopuses she met at the New England Aqua
Read more

A Chat with E. Christopher Clark, author of the Stains of Time series

In the first book of his Stains of Time series, E.Christopher Clark pulls in magical realism, a hearty dose of nineties’ nostalgia, and family drama to tell Veronica’s story. Pregnant at sixteen, Veronica marries the baby’s father to appease a father who might never be happy with her, but really won’t be happy with her if she follows her heart and dates women as she wants to. Clark kindly answered About a Book’s questions about The Piano of Death , the series as it stands now, and his plans for its future. About a Book : How/when did you conceive of The Piano of Death ? Clark : The book that people can read today really started to come together in September 2011. I met with my friend, the actor/director Crystal Lisbon…to plan a benefit for the arts organization she was starting. Another friend of Crystal’s, the musician Mary Casiello [joined us for that meeting]. We were trying to put together an evening of theater and music, and I was tasked with writing the scrip
Read more

Almost Too Much Covered in The Tradition

In his third book of poetry, The Tradition , Jericho Brown covers much ground: he grapples with myth, media, racism, his own mortality, and still manages to push past established forms of poetry. It’s impressive in scope, but the breadth can leave the reader forgetting the ground covered because there was too much of it. Brown conveys a disdain for the world around him that embraces and encourages racism and violence, but also exudes a confidence about his own abilities to navigate the terrain. This is a book from a grown, tired man, and is filled with the heartbreak and the fortitude he’s earned. He introduces, too, the “Duplex” form in his poetry, described by Jeannine Hall Gailey in her Barrelhouse review of The Tradition as “a sonnet-like series of couplets that include repetition.” The repetition accomplishes a layering of experiences and voices, making his experiences feel that much more echoed in the lives of others, as though he is not alone. These stories are from a
Read more