Hi y'all , the booklub has been going off. (I'm sure I posted on here once before...)

I've manged recently to plough through Jared Diamond "Guns Germs and Steel", so am feeling quite righteous and a "big picture" sciencey, non-fiction reader. Jared wrote it in 1997 and its a big favourite of enviro-nerds so I'm a late starter with this one. He has a very strong main thrust is that the reason some well established societies were totally overrun and engulfed others this last few centuries century was not because they were inhenently inferior. The title refers to his summary that the reasons for the decimation of poulations of Aztecs, Indigenous Americans and Australian Aboriginies (to name just a few) was mostly to do with the possesion of firearms, endemdic diseases, technology, and writing by the invaders. For 425 pages he tracks back to find the sources of all these things, and says they are all linked to the first instance of domestic food production and animal husbandry, and that stepping back again these things were a bit like a lucky dip. Some continents happened to have plants and animals that could be farmed and some didn't. And some continents have geography that allows people to move ideas and new innovations around and some don't.

I really enjoyed it but did tend to skim over some of the more in depth methodology parts that science writers love so much. One of his big themes was using some of the observation and deduction methods of "science" to look at broad trends in what is usually classed as "history". Mm, meaty. On reading this kind of chunky treatise, I perveresly wonder what it would take to crunch the ideas down into the scale of say a picture book or comic book. I think with a lot of maps and drawing you could say so much about the picture he paints of the world over the last 13,000 years. It was a fortunate that we are minding many of a neighbour's books at the moment, and this was one of them.

To balance that out one of the trash books in the recently read pile was a 2004 terry pratchett... nerdgrl, signing off.