Cheap Guns, Germs, and Steel (DVD) (Stacy Blunt, Santa Clause) Price

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Customer Reviews of Guns, Germs, and Steel

Very interesting
Thank you for your research. I was in Papua New Guinea and it was very interesting to learn about this DVD prior to visiting. Now that I am back, I will watch it again because it makes even more sense to me.

not deep but worth 3 hours watching
I saw the 3rd part on TV and just had to watch the rest. It's well done, interesting with the usual excellent filmography by NatGeo, as well as enlightening dialogue with J.Diamond. It is a personal story, the answer to a New Guinean's question posed 30 years ago:"how come you white men have so much cargo and us New Guineans have so little?" <
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>So exactly why did Europeans conquer the world in the 16th-19th centuries? His short answer is the title: Guns, Germs and Steel. His long answer is biogeography, Europeans had a leg up on the rest of the world because of wheat and cows, which allowed a higher, more materially prosperous, greater population centered in larger cities society which overwhelmed the aborginal peoples of N and S America, Oceania and the Southern tip of Africa. It's almost common wisdom that this is at least part of the answer, but Diamond does an excellent job of arguing the point and showing the consequences of this division into Northern and Southern societies. <
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>I enjoyed the show, it is not a deeply thinking type of documentary, but rather aimed more at the emotions, the feelings of comradeship that ought to exist like the bonds between Diamond and the people he knows in New Guinea, or the sympathy for young malaria victims in Africa. The idea that the west, that Europeans, are blessed not for what they are, nor for what they did, but simply because of where their ancestors settled, is meant to temper the common ideal that my arm has gotten me this wealth and it is justificably mine to do whatever i think best, that those in need have only to reach out and do the same thing to succeed, rather than expecting a handout from the strong. Not a bad lesson at all, gratitude, modesty, sharing, not done in a particularly heavy handed preaching way as is often the case, but rather low keyed, here are the facts, you are not better than the New Guineans but rather more lucky, not smarter or more hard working or whatever, just fortunate. <
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>I look forward to Diamond meet a Chinese man who asks him:"why does the West have so much when us Chinese had all the pieces you mention long before the Europeans. But we used gunpowder to make firecrackers not firearms. Why doesn't material wealth follow good culture and wisdom?" And that is where the show leaves me, what he says is all good and probably substantially true, but why didn't China develop long before the West?