Jared Diamond Popular Books

Jared Diamond Biography & Facts

Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist, historian, and author. In 1985 he received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and he has written hundreds of scientific and popular articles and books. His best known is Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which received multiple awards including the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. He has over 50 articles published in the scientific journal Nature, as well as a similar number in the popular magazine Discover. In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is commonly referred to as a polymath, stemming from his knowledge in many fields including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Science, an honor bestowed by the President of the United States and the National Science Foundation. As of 2024, he is a professor of geography at UCLA. Early life and education Diamond was born on September 10, 1937, in Boston, Massachusetts. Both of his parents were Ashkenazi Jewish. His father, Louis Diamond, was a physician who emigrated from Chișinău in present-day Moldova, then known as Bessarabia. His mother, Flora née Kaplan, was a teacher, linguist, and concert pianist. Diamond began studying piano at age six; years later, he would propose to his wife after playing Brahms' Intermezzo in A major for her.By the age of seven he developed an interest in birdwatching. This became one of his major life passions and resulted in a number of works published in ornithology.He attended the Roxbury Latin School and studied biochemical sciences at Harvard College, graduating in 1958. He later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and graduated from Cambridge with a Ph.D. in 1961; his thesis was on the physiology and biophysics of membranes in the gallbladder. Career After graduation from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands, which he began visiting from 1964. Later, in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became a professor of geography at UCLA, his current position. He also teaches at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. He is a lecturer on the biodiversity management course at the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability (EIIS) in Rome. He won the National Medal of Science in 1999. He has been invited to give two TED talks, "Why do societies collapse" (2008), and "How societies can grow old better (2013).Diamond originally specialized in salt absorption in the gall bladder. He has also published scholarly works in the fields of ecology and ornithology, but is arguably best known for authoring a number of popular science and history books combining topics from diverse fields other than those he has formally studied. Because of this academic diversity, Diamond has been described as a polymath. Selected popular works Diamond has written scores of academic peer-reviewed articles for publications such as the scientific journal Nature. He has also written scores of popular science articles in publications such as Discover, as well as several bestselling popular books, notably The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005), The World Until Yesterday (2012), and Upheaval (2019). For a full list, see Jared Diamond bibliography § Books. The Third Chimpanzee (1991) Diamond's first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examines human evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating evidence from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. The book traces how humans evolved to be so different from other animals, despite sharing over 98% of our DNA with our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees. The book also examines the animal origins of language, art, agriculture, smoking and drug use, and other apparently uniquely human attributes. It was well received by critics and won the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) His second and best known popular science book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. It asks why Eurasian peoples conquered or displaced Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of vice versa. It argues that this outcome was not due to genetic advantages of Eurasian peoples themselves but instead to features of the Eurasian continent, in particular, its high diversity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication and its east/west major axis that favored the spread of those domesticates, people, technologies—and diseases—for long distances with little change in latitude.The first part of the book focuses on reasons why only a few species of wild plants and animals proved suitable for domestication. The second part discusses how local food production based on those domesticates led to the development of dense and stratified human populations, writing, centralized political organization, and epidemic infectious diseases. The third part compares the development of food production and of human societies among different continents and world regions. Guns, Germs, and Steel became an international best-seller, was translated into 33 languages, and received several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. A television documentary series based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005. Why is Sex Fun? (1997) In his third book, Why is Sex Fun?, also published in 1997, Diamond discusses evolutionary factors underlying features of human sexuality that are generally taken for granted but that are highly unusual among our animal relatives. Those features include a long-term pair relationship (marriage), coexistence of economically cooperating pairs within a shared communal territory, provision of parental care by fathers as well as by mothers, having sex in private rather than in public, concealed ovulation, female sexual receptivity encompassing most of the menstrual cycle (including days of infertility), female menopause, and distinctive secondary sexual characteristics. Collapse (2005) Diamond's next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005, examines a range of past societies in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or continued to thrive and considers what contemporary societies can learn from these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against explanations for the failure of past societies based primarily on.... Discover the Jared Diamond popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jared Diamond books.