Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

This book uses a broad approach to explain why some human societies are able to conquer others. For Diamond, it all comes back to environment. He contends that some environments are more conducive (both in their climate and in the naturally occurring potential crops and domestic animals) for food-production and farming than others. Human societies in these environments, then, are more likely to become farmers and sedentary than mobile hunter-gathers. Farmers, in turn, develop diseases (from close living with animals), systems of writing (because food can be stockpiled allowing for people to do other things than worry about their next meal all the time), complex systems of government, and metallurgy and other technologies. I applaud this book for its ambition and its style (very easy to read and entertaining). I could see it skipping and over-simplifying in places, though, and I think its broad scope is thus both a strength and a weakness.