Diamond tells us that the impetus for the book came from a native New Guinea friend, Yali, who asked him, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?'' The long and short of it, says Diamond, is biogeography.
On the whole this is an impressive achievement, with nods to the historians, anthropologists and others who have laid the groundwork. MacArthur fellow and UCLA evolutionary biologist Diamond ( The Third Chimpanzee, 1992, etc.) takes as his theme no less than the rise of human civilizations.
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