guns germs & steel
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anyone else see these docu-dramas ? I haven't read the book but the TV shows were interesting. the internet feedback was somewhat critical, the author seems a bit of a glory hound for a biology sociology type PBS-TV[^] AMAZON-BOOK[^] NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC[^] OURPAL-WIKI[^]
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anyone else see these docu-dramas ? I haven't read the book but the TV shows were interesting. the internet feedback was somewhat critical, the author seems a bit of a glory hound for a biology sociology type PBS-TV[^] AMAZON-BOOK[^] NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC[^] OURPAL-WIKI[^]
i read the book years ago, and liked it a lot. it provides a lot more depth than the series (of course). i watched a few of the shows, but got sick of hearing him say "Guns, Germs and Steel" every two minutes. yeah, yeah we get it. it's like on Rock Star - INXS, where they have to say "blahblahblah our band, INXS" every time they say anything. Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker
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anyone else see these docu-dramas ? I haven't read the book but the TV shows were interesting. the internet feedback was somewhat critical, the author seems a bit of a glory hound for a biology sociology type PBS-TV[^] AMAZON-BOOK[^] NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC[^] OURPAL-WIKI[^]
I caught it few weeks/months back. I thought it was fairly interesting. I have the book, which I haven't made time to finish, but it's on the list as soon as I get it back from my father. BW
Meanwhile, behind the facade of this innocent looking bookstore...
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anyone else see these docu-dramas ? I haven't read the book but the TV shows were interesting. the internet feedback was somewhat critical, the author seems a bit of a glory hound for a biology sociology type PBS-TV[^] AMAZON-BOOK[^] NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC[^] OURPAL-WIKI[^]
I didn't know they made a series from the book. And am surprised about it. The book has so much information... I can't imagine someone putting half of it in the short time of a TV series. I liked this book a lot. I already liked natural history and human history before, but it never ocurred me to mix both in the way the book does it. It is strange to see people talking about Mr. Diamond as a "glory hound". I read other articles about sociobiology, but never saw such a complete and deep account of events as in this book. I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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anyone else see these docu-dramas ? I haven't read the book but the TV shows were interesting. the internet feedback was somewhat critical, the author seems a bit of a glory hound for a biology sociology type PBS-TV[^] AMAZON-BOOK[^] NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC[^] OURPAL-WIKI[^]
The book is interesting but I thought he repeated himself a lot. It could have been a fair bit shorter without losing anything important.
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i read the book years ago, and liked it a lot. it provides a lot more depth than the series (of course). i watched a few of the shows, but got sick of hearing him say "Guns, Germs and Steel" every two minutes. yeah, yeah we get it. it's like on Rock Star - INXS, where they have to say "blahblahblah our band, INXS" every time they say anything. Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker
yes repeating GGS over and over and over was definitely annoying but some of the ideas were well presented, plus TV seems better than books for some things one particularly icky thing shown on TV was about some ancient tribes in Africa that had "evolved" into small isolated communities staying on higher ground. this was beneficial because the higher ground kept them away from mosquitoes & malaria which basically rules the lower grounds near water, and being isolated kept diseases from blasting thruout the entire population. then they constrasted this "intelligent design" of smaller isolated communities on higher ground, with the british invaders who of course built their camps near water & either died from malaria which was a new diseases for them, or died from lack of food because their imported animals & crops did not grow very well in a different geographic zone and then they showed some small "modern" African country/city railway depot that embodied poverty, crime, etc and blamed this all on modern western concepts of profit economies vs. healthy people good points for sure but for me at least seeing this splashed across my TV probably made more of an impact than reading it in a book, much less a brief blurb on some computer forum :-D
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I didn't know they made a series from the book. And am surprised about it. The book has so much information... I can't imagine someone putting half of it in the short time of a TV series. I liked this book a lot. I already liked natural history and human history before, but it never ocurred me to mix both in the way the book does it. It is strange to see people talking about Mr. Diamond as a "glory hound". I read other articles about sociobiology, but never saw such a complete and deep account of events as in this book. I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
I posted that glory hound blather mostly based on watching the TV shows and hearing the title GGS over & over & over again, immediately followed by the author "explaining" how he spent 30 years researching this concept I guess since the TV show was split into multiple parts, each part had to be kind of self-contained, but the author was ever present during each hour segment, spouting about how vast & important these concepts are, how well founded they are in reality & how much of his life he spent learning about these all important ideas fine. do some easy internet searches & find out this author is just REPEATING what has been said several times over the past 100+ years by dozens of other biologist sociologist people. the wiki link has good pro/con views about this enviro-deterministic theory my favorite slam of this stuff is that it almost completely ignores peoples society, ie. religion & other factors europe had lots of turmoil & strife and this caused lots of people to move around the continent for good & bad later effects. this kind of stuff didn't happen down in south america which might also explain why current history is dominated by dead european white males instead of other people
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anyone else see these docu-dramas ? I haven't read the book but the TV shows were interesting. the internet feedback was somewhat critical, the author seems a bit of a glory hound for a biology sociology type PBS-TV[^] AMAZON-BOOK[^] NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC[^] OURPAL-WIKI[^]
greghop wrote: I haven't read the book I did a couple of months back - and apart from a couple of minor bits I noticed may need rechecking due to newer [1] archaeological evidence, it's excellent. [1] That is to say, findings that were older than those that were available at the time the book was written (1998, IIRC).
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i read the book years ago, and liked it a lot. it provides a lot more depth than the series (of course). i watched a few of the shows, but got sick of hearing him say "Guns, Germs and Steel" every two minutes. yeah, yeah we get it. it's like on Rock Star - INXS, where they have to say "blahblahblah our band, INXS" every time they say anything. Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker
I can't believe they chose JD. They'll be sorry when he re-arranges all of their songs to suit his limited vocal ability, and after his second or third tantrum when he doesn't get his way.
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I can't believe they chose JD. They'll be sorry when he re-arranges all of their songs to suit his limited vocal ability, and after his second or third tantrum when he doesn't get his way.
Ed Gadziemski wrote: and after his second or third tantrum that's the part that bugged me.. he's such a manipulative little creep.. oh well. :) Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker
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I can't believe they chose JD. They'll be sorry when he re-arranges all of their songs to suit his limited vocal ability, and after his second or third tantrum when he doesn't get his way.
Ed Gadziemski wrote: they chose JD Jared Diamond won the INXS thingy? :~ BW
Meanwhile, behind the facade of this innocent looking bookstore...