Negative Positive
Title: Polymathic Tour de Force
Review: A dazzling display of erudition, insight and synthesis that seeks to explore the factors that have enabled some societies to be more successful than others. Many of the ideas in this book can be found elsewhere but I have not found any other single work that manages to combine history, biology, linguistics, geology, paleontology and anthropology into a unified argument that provides such a useful paradigm for studying the unequal outcomes of world history. Whatever your own beliefs and opinions and however much you might disagree with Diamond's particular arguments, you can't help but learn from this book (ever heard of glottochronology?). All in all, an impressive and thought-provoking work.
Is the review positive or negative? 