Jared Diamond doesn’t use a computer. He relies “completely” on his secretary and on his wife for “anything” requiring one, as he puts it. Diamond also confesses that he lacks the ability to turn on his “home television set” and can “do only the simplest things” with his newly acquired iPhone. “Whenever friends have shown me how to use a computer, they turn it on and something goes wrong,” Diamond once explained to an aghast reporter. “I just get frustrated.”



UPHEAVAL: TURNING POINTS FOR NATIONS IN CRISIS by Jared Diamond Little, Brown and Company, 512 pp., $35.00

Such incapacities haven’t held Diamond back. Just the opposite. He has spent much of his career explaining and championing the “modern ‘Stone Age’ peoples,” as he calls them—cultures reliant on tools and practices dating back thousands of years. The most “vivid part of my life,” Diamond has written, was spent in “technologically primitive human societies,” especially the “intact” societies of New Guinea, where Diamond worked for decades studying birds. It was on one such ornithological trip in the 1970s that Diamond encountered a “remarkable” Papua New Guinean named Yali. Diamond met him by chance on a beach, the two walked together for an hour, and Yali—with a “penetrating glance of his flashing eyes”—asked a big question: Why did whites have so much and New Guineans so little?

Diamond’s breakout book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was his answer. It offered a sweeping survey of the past 13,000 years. Thinking as a scientist, Diamond searched for the variables that had shaped societies. Though he couldn’t run laboratory experiments on large human groups, he could find “natural experiments,” similar societies that differed in just a few crucial respects. Their divergent fates could illuminate the effects of those differences. Islands and other locales with a “considerable degree of isolation,” Diamond wrote, work best for this purpose.

On the scale of millennia, Diamond concluded, individual decisions don’t make much difference to the trajectories of societies. Environmental factors are far more important. Guns, Germs, and Steel emphasized the shape of continents. Eurasia’s horizontal axis allowed plants and germs to spread easily along latitudinal belts, endowing its inhabitants with large populations, powerful technologies, and fiercely contagious diseases (useful weapons in colonizing foreign lands). The Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, run on vertical axes and produced smaller and less epidemiologically menacing civilizations. It was a reassuring conclusion, conspicuously rejecting racism and chauvinism in its account of nonindustrial cultures.

The book was stuffed with hundreds of pages of geography, epidemiology, and archaeology, and it presented virtually no characters besides Yali. Nevertheless, it caught fire, selling more than 1.5 million copies in dozens of languages, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and taking up a permanent perch in airport bookstores across the planet. It helped that Guns, Germs, and Steel was fun. Diamond offered charming explanations of why humans learned to farm almonds but never acorns (“slow growth and fast squirrels”), or why they ride horses but not zebras (nasty dispositions and a penchant for biting). Eight years later, Diamond produced a sequel, Collapse, studying mainly “small, poor, peripheral, past societies” that had fallen apart—the Norse in Greenland, and the ill-omened inhabitants of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. These, too, he chronicled with palpable sympathy. “They were people like us,” he wrote. And perhaps, without care, we might share their fate.