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Title: Facts to fit conclusions
Review: Such an interesting opening question - "Why do white people have all the cargo?" and such a disappointing result. Diamond says early on that he intends to creat a non-racist explanation for European dominance, constructs a series of variables (see above reviews) required for success, isolates three or four places in the world where these variablies intersect, and then proceeds to find reasons why only the Europeans could have succeeded. My favorite naked cop-out: China could not develop an advance society because its coastline is smooth, see, and so dissenters had no place to hide from a centralized government that suppressed innovation.(Um, why?) Europe's coastline, by contrast, is crinkly. Bettcha didn't know that!
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