guns germs and steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond has a clear focus, seeking and convincingly providing the answer to the question "why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?" In other words, why did Columbus discover America and Pizarro conquer the Incas rather than the Inca "discovering" and conquering Europe? Why did Europe colonize Africa instead of vice versa? And he isn't satisfied with simply considering the immediate causes -- "Guns, Germs, …

…leading to differences from one continent to another. The degrees of exposure and immunity to those diseases, which, too, plays an important role in history with diseases from Europe decimating the native populations of the Americas and also of Australia. Dealing with all of human history, worldwide, in very broad strokes, Guns, Germs, and Steel focuses on what really matters: geography, food production, diet, domestication of mammals: all the stuff that traditional history courses ignore.