Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

In this book Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, attempts to put forth the reasons for why things are the way they are in the world. In doing this, he composes a brief history of the world from the beginning of "civilization", or what he terms to be 13,000 B.C.
Diamond starts out with an overview of the migration of homo-sapiens across the globe, first into Asia from Africa, then Europe and Oceania and finally into the Americas. He then spends the remainder of the book going over what factors contributed to some peoples having technological advantages over other peoples and how they were able to either exterminate or contribute to the evolution of those peoples.
Jared starts from the bottom in pointing out how the basic geographic features of the continents affected the ability of said continents' inhabitants to develop domestication of plants and farming. First, he states that the continent of Eurasia had a bigger advantage from the start, because it is by far larger than any of the other continents, and holds the most domesticable native plants. Then, he points out how the continents' axes affect agriculture and how it took many more years for Americans and Africans to develop agriculture than it did for Eurasians, because America and Africa have a vertical axis, with many varying climates and obstacles such as the Saharan and Mexican deserts, respectively, which would make it hard for the spread of agriculture, while Eurasia has a horizontal axis with few varying climates, which makes it easy. Then, he points out how Eurasia also had a way bigger advantage in that it has a lot more native domesticable animals than any other continent, and how these animals made food production even easier.
The next big thing that Diamond points out is how food production leads to the forming of civilization in that it allows many people to live close together and have jobs other than finding food and hunting (as is in a traditional hunter-gatherer society). These jobs then lead to the development of technologies such as writing systems (in order to record farming records), governments (to control the large number of people living closely together), and steel/guns (for weapons against other warring societies). Another advantage that these early civilizations brought to the table in Eurasia were germs, carried by the domesticated animals that they lived with and were used for farming. After thousands of years of living with these germs, the people of Eurasia built up an immunity to them, leaving themselves as human viruses to people outside Eurasia who were not immune to said germs.
Finally, Diamond talks about how Eurasians evolved so much faster allowing them, in 1492 to start a conquest of the globe, using their advanced guns, germs, and steel to exterminate or enslave all natives of other continents. In the end, Jared brings us back from all the detail and second-guessing about the causes for everything and points out a very simple fact-that the evolution of the continents could have easily been predicted by simply looking at the varying population sizes: Eurasia being first, Africa being second, the Americas being third and Australia being last.
Jared Diamond's masterpiece was by far the most well-written and informative book that I have ever read. It crushes all racial barriers in explaining, using archaeological and linguistic evidence, how the peoples' of the world came to be where they were in 1492 and how Eurasians did not have a biological advantage (as many racists believe), but a mere geographical one. This book made me look at the world in a whole different way and understand why peoples such as Aboriginal Australians and African Pygmies came to be conquered by white Europeans as well as made me notice things about the world that I never would have noticed before. Finally, it got me thinking, is it really fair to suggest that we white Europeans are any more intelligent than those Aboriginal Australians or African Pygmies, just because we had an evolutionary advantage over them? I believe the answer is no, because we are all physiological the same and therefore, given the same evolutionary tools, we would all have the same chance at becoming what we are today.