Andreas Arni, Swiss Market Head at Lombard Odier

«Guns, Germs and Steel – A short history of everybody for the last 13’00 years» by Jared Diamond,

What is the book about:

«Guns, Germs and Steel» is a popular science book by UCLA professor Jared Diamond. It describes the rise and fall of civilizations and explains the imperialism of European cultures beginning in 1500 AD. Diamond describes how differences in the technological and cultural developments of civilizations are primarily explained by exogenous factors such as geography and immunology, rather than being primarily genetic in origin.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was used as the basis for a «National Geographic» television series in 2005. It has sold more than a million copies. TIME magazine awarded it the label «one of the best non-fiction books of all time».

Why I recommend this book:

Jared Diamond succeeds in captivating the reader with exciting scientific findings from the disciplines of anthropology, biology, and history. The reader is presented with numerous interesting insights – for example, why European civilizations developed immunity to zoonotic domestic animal viruses more quickly than other peoples, which was to their advantage in conflicts with foreign peoples, or why gunpowder was first invented in China, but then primarily enabled the Europeans to subjugate colonies. The well-known author Yuval Harari rightly describes the book as follows: «A book of big questions and big answers».