Life isn't fair--here's why: Since 1500, Europeans have, for better and worse, called the tune that the world has danced to. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the reasons why things worked out that way. It is an elemental question, and Diamond is certainly not the first to ask it. However, he performs a singular service by relying on scientific fact rather than specious theories of European genetic superiority. Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, suggests that the geography of Eurasia was best suited to farming, the domestication of animals and the free flow of information. The more populous cultures that developed as a result had more complex forms of government and communication--and increased resistance to disease. Finally, fragmented Europe harnessed the power of competitive innovation in ways that China did not. (For example, the Europeans used the Chinese invention of gunpowder to create guns and subjugate the New World.) Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without bias, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.

The World's Most Dangerous Thought Experiment, 24 Dec 2008
(1) Diamond bravely puts his reputation on the block here. He tries to determine just why there has always been those well-known haves and have nots, both across history and still to this day.

(2) Diamond uses many disciplines in his analysis - anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, biology/microbiology, history, epidemiology, migrational studies, immunology, history of medicine, the history of technology etc.

(3) He argues that the scientific, technological, engineering, medical, architectural, mathematical and other such achievements and innovations of certain races of humankind (white skinned and brown skinned) are no more than a matter of geographical luck and being in the right place at the right time.

(4) There is no more to it than that. It's not a matter of sheer mental talents, astonishing scientific and mathematical creative gifts, amazing minds, boundless brilliance, a lack of indolence. It's certainly not due to a congenitally superior intellect. It's nothing to do with the ability to think deeply, with sheer power, intricacy, subtlety and finesse and the drive to work and think hard.

(5) What this often unintentionally funny book basically suggests to me is that its readers run a very dangerous thought experiment. Would you like to try my thought experiment here and now? Let's go.

(6) First, run back the clock of time. Run it back to the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens. Now take the 4 major racial types: Australoids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids. Remove the second group from the face of the Earth, forever.

(7) Now run history forward with what you've got. Do we have 2 space probes that have left the solar system? Cell phones? FED or SED Television? Computers? Software? The Internet? Bose-Einstein condensates? Broadcasting? Immensely complex broadcast equipment and receivers? DAB radio? Newspapers? The microchip? Recording and mixing desks? Blu-ray DVD players? Inoculations? The Airbus A380? The Large Hadron Collider? Gravitational wave experiments? Robots on Mars and a probe on a moon of Saturn? Do we have GPS satellites that take the Theory of Relativity into account? Cities? Sanitation? Highways? Bridges? Schools? The combustion engine? Machinery? Space probes that take gravitational sling-shots from planets? Ground and space telescopes? Manufacturing? Electricity? Nuclear energy? The modern battery? Trains and railways? Nanotechnology? Atomic clocks? Add to the list yourself - because there's a lot. Isn't there?

(8) Do we have the astonishing, colossal and stupendous scientific, engineering, mathematical, architectural, medical, surgical, medical scientific and technological achievements made upon the Earth to date?

(9) Would we even end up with the book or the wheel by 2010?

(10) Do we have a rich history, with a Euler, an Einstein, an Ed Witten, a Carl Friedrich Gauss, a Marie Curie, Bohr, Born, James Clerk-Maxwell, Watson & Crick & Wilkins & Rosalind Franklin, Darwin, Davy, Lise Meitner, Euclid, Archimedes, Faraday, Kepler, Newton, Robert Boyle? Poincare, Charles Lyell, Mendel, Oppenheimer, Planck, Boltzmann, Pauli, Heisenberg, Shrodinger, Rutherford, Dirac, Feynman, Hawking, Pauling, Lavosier, Mendeleev, Dalton, David Hilbert, Galois, Riemann, Ramanujan, Wheeler, Galileo Galilei, da Vinci, Helmholtz, William Thomson, Clausius, Willard Gibbs, Walther Nernst, Turing, Godel, Wittgenstein, Berners-Lee, Hubble, Kaluza-Klein, Pasteur, Gell-Mann, Veneziano, Michio Kaku, Sadi Carnot, Robert Mayer, Eddington, Fermi, Chandrasekhar, Lisa Randall? Google great architects, engineers, famous geologists, pioneering surgeons and other such people too ... add to the list.

(11) Would we really have all this astonishing mental achievement and all these great outcomes? To me the answer is clearly NO. We would not be even close.

(12) Jared Diamond argues differently. Read his book. Then sit down and run, in your own head, the world's most dangerous thought experiment ...

Interesting read, 21 Nov 2008
This book seemed to be on dsplay in bookshops at around the same time as "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" by David Landes. Whereas David Landes is an economic historian, Jared Diamond is an anthropologist and geographer.

Having read both books, it struck me that there were often two competing explanations for the same phenemona. I think each author should moderate the others views. I think that both authors have a tendency to push their own pet theories a little further than they really ought to go and perhaps it would be better to take the best insights from both approaches and combine them into a bigger explanation than arguing about 'what came first - the chicken or the egg?'.

Diamond combines grand overarching theories with detailed discussions of such topics as the way in which various plants and animals were first domesticated.

Altogether a compelling read but one has to take it with a pinch of salt.



Good history, but not the complete story?, 12 Nov 2008
At the simple level, this book is a tour de force of the history and geography of mankind, and of how the latter has helped to shape the former. It is a book that everybody should read, if only to counterbalance the eurocentric versions of world history that dominate the bookshelves. Diamond explains how accidents of plant and animal distribution gave some peoples the advantages in agriculture and hence population density that they needed to conquer others, and most interestingly, led them to develop world-conquering diseases.

However, I was a little wary when the author of a science book sets out with a political aim, namely to prove that the present observed inequalities in wealth, goods and technology between peoples of the world are entirely explained by the environment. Put simply, Diamond tries to settle the 'nature-nurture' debate once and for all in the favour of nurture. While I think he makes a compelling case why Australasia never developed agriculture and the technologies that spring from it, the argument is much thinner in the case of Africa and the Americas. Why, for example, in continents that lacked suitable horses or oxen to provide mechanical power were there no attempts to develop water-wheels or windmills?

While many of Diamond's observations about the three major land-masses on Earth are undoubtedly correct, there is no reason why these could not coexist with other explanations, such as genetic differences between the capabilities and behavioural preferences of different peoples. And if they were to coexist, there is a likelihood that natural advantages would reinforce the rate at which genetic differences developed and diverged. In order to prove that the wealth differences are entirely the result of the environment, Diamond would also need to disprove that there are any genetic differences, something that he fails to do. I'm afraid that the only argument he proposes against genetic contributors, namely "because they are supported by racists", while it may be true, doesn't cut the mustard intellectually. No, he needs to demolish the genetic argument systematically, citing references from equally reputable peer-reviewed journals.

Sometimes the holes in his argument are in what is omitted, rather than in factual content (which is, by and large, impeccable). For example, he stated that the native people of New Guinea were likely more intelligent on average than native Europeans, because the former have much greater natural selection pressures placed upon them, both from the environment, and from the much higher murder rate. In doing so, of course, he avoids the possible effects of sexual selection for intelligence over the last 10000 years: in the West, the preference of women for wealthy men, who have the resources to support more children, must surely have influenced the population's genetic profile. Likewise, the harsh winters in Eurasia seem to have led to resource-storing behaviours in the North, and this ability to defer gratification, which has at least in part a genetic root, has contributed to Eurasian numeracy, inventiveness, capitalisation, finance, trade, and other behaviours that have led to us having all the 'cargo'.

In summary, this book is a notable achievement, and a very worthwhile read. However, while it contributes much to the debate on the varying fortunes of the peoples on different continents, it fails in its political aim, that of proving that genetic differences have played no part in the matter.

Plants, animals and farming, 28 Jun 2008
Have you ever wondered why the world has developed the way that it has? Why some cultures and peoples seem to have prospered better than, or even at the expense of, others? If so, Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond is a book I would recommend to you. It is deeply thought provoking and well written, squeezing a history of humankind's development over the past 13,000 years into around 400 pages, which, as Diamond points out, is about 150 years per page, so not a small feat.

The basic premise of the book is that all of the worlds more advanced societies, including both those still present today and those that have disappeared into history, needed a set of complementary enablers (Ultimate Factors) to be present to allow them to develop from the original state of hunter-gatherers, from which base all people originally started. The thing that surprised me about this was just how short this list of required enablers is and as a result just how unlikely/fortunate it was that many different and varied societies did develop at all.

From the Ultimate factors, Diamond draws out a series of sequential proximate factors that lead to such historical events as European settlers not managing to settle the vast majority of the African continent or New Guinea, the decimation of the original inhabitants of North America - mostly through diseases introduced from the Old World. And, many more.

In brief, a selection of these factors include:

*The geography of any given area and the plant and animal species supported; how many of the originally wild animal species would prove suitable for domestication; How many wild plants would be worth planting - rather than say, going hunting?

*If you had enough plants and animals to domesticate, would you give up being a hunter gatherer?

*If you became a farming society would you produce enough spare food to support none-food producing crafts; politicians and artisans?

*If you did support none-food producing peoples would this eventually lead to a large dense and sedentary society etc etc

One of the many things that I really liked about this book was that it is not written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, which is very refreshing. Further, although the book isn't, I believe, intended to be a scientific text on the matter, Diamond does provide extensive references for further reading should anyone wish to do so.

I read this book having (relatively) recently finished reading Pathfinders by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and found the two books to be very complementary. I would recommend this book and Pathfinders to anyone with an interest in history, politics or humanity in general.


Enlightening, 30 May 2008
Wow. Well I have always wondered in the back of my mind why the continents have spanned out as they have, and as only great scientists can Mr Diamond has got round to answering in a hugely ambitious and incredibly fact-filled fascinating book.

I can't really say anything that hasn't been said here already but most importantly for me this book has reignited a passion for human history in me and that is achievement enough.

The World's Most Dangerous Thought Experiment, 24 Dec 2008
(1) Diamond bravely puts his reputation on the block here. He tries to determine just why there has always been those well-known haves and have nots, both across history and still to this day.

(2) Diamond uses many disciplines in his analysis - anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, biology/microbiology, history, epidemiology, migrational studies, immunology, history of medicine, the history of technology etc.

(3) He argues that the scientific, technological, engineering, medical, architectural, mathematical and other such achievements and innovations of certain races of humankind (white skinned and brown skinned) are no more than a matter of geographical luck and being in the right place at the right time.

(4) There is no more to it than that. It's not a matter of sheer mental talents, astonishing scientific and mathematical creative gifts, amazing minds, boundless brilliance, a lack of indolence. It's certainly not due to a congenitally superior intellect. It's nothing to do with the ability to think deeply, with sheer power, intricacy, subtlety and finesse and the drive to work and think hard.

(5) What this often unintentionally funny book basically suggests to me is that its readers run a very dangerous thought experiment. Would you like to try my thought experiment here and now? Let's go.

(6) First, run back the clock of time. Run it back to the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens. Now take the 4 major racial types: Australoids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids. Remove the second group from the face of the Earth, forever.

(7) Now run history forward with what you've got. Do we have 2 space probes that have left the solar system? Cell phones? FED or SED Television? Computers? Software? The Internet? Bose-Einstein condensates? Broadcasting? Immensely complex broadcast equipment and receivers? DAB radio? Newspapers? The microchip? Recording and mixing desks? Blu-ray DVD players? Inoculations? The Airbus A380? The Large Hadron Collider? Gravitational wave experiments? Robots on Mars and a probe on a moon of Saturn? Do we have GPS satellites that take the Theory of Relativity into account? Cities? Sanitation? Highways? Bridges? Schools? The combustion engine? Machinery? Space probes that take gravitational sling-shots from planets? Ground and space telescopes? Manufacturing? Electricity? Nuclear energy? The modern battery? Trains and railways? Nanotechnology? Atomic clocks? Add to the list yourself - because there's a lot. Isn't there?

(8) Do we have the astonishing, colossal and stupendous scientific, engineering, mathematical, architectural, medical, surgical, medical scientific and technological achievements made upon the Earth to date?

(9) Would we even end up with the book or the wheel by 2010?

(10) Do we have a rich history, with a Euler, an Einstein, an Ed Witten, a Carl Friedrich Gauss, a Marie Curie, Bohr, Born, James Clerk-Maxwell, Watson & Crick & Wilkins & Rosalind Franklin, Darwin, Davy, Lise Meitner, Euclid, Archimedes, Faraday, Kepler, Newton, Robert Boyle? Poincare, Charles Lyell, Mendel, Oppenheimer, Planck, Boltzmann, Pauli, Heisenberg, Shrodinger, Rutherford, Dirac, Feynman, Hawking, Pauling, Lavosier, Mendeleev, Dalton, David Hilbert, Galois, Riemann, Ramanujan, Wheeler, Galileo Galilei, da Vinci, Helmholtz, William Thomson, Clausius, Willard Gibbs, Walther Nernst, Turing, Godel, Wittgenstein, Berners-Lee, Hubble, Kaluza-Klein, Pasteur, Gell-Mann, Veneziano, Michio Kaku, Sadi Carnot, Robert Mayer, Eddington, Fermi, Chandrasekhar, Lisa Randall? Google great architects, engineers, famous geologists, pioneering surgeons and other such people too ... add to the list.

(11) Would we really have all this astonishing mental achievement and all these great outcomes? To me the answer is clearly NO. We would not be even close.

(12) Jared Diamond argues differently. Read his book. Then sit down and run, in your own head, the world's most dangerous thought experiment ...

Interesting read, 21 Nov 2008
This book seemed to be on dsplay in bookshops at around the same time as "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" by David Landes. Whereas David Landes is an economic historian, Jared Diamond is an anthropologist and geographer.

Having read both books, it struck me that there were often two competing explanations for the same phenemona. I think each author should moderate the others views. I think that both authors have a tendency to push their own pet theories a little further than they really ought to go and perhaps it would be better to take the best insights from both approaches and combine them into a bigger explanation than arguing about 'what came first - the chicken or the egg?'.

Diamond combines grand overarching theories with detailed discussions of such topics as the way in which various plants and animals were first domesticated.

Altogether a compelling read but one has to take it with a pinch of salt.



Good history, but not the complete story?, 12 Nov 2008
At the simple level, this book is a tour de force of the history and geography of mankind, and of how the latter has helped to shape the former. It is a book that everybody should read, if only to counterbalance the eurocentric versions of world history that dominate the bookshelves. Diamond explains how accidents of plant and animal distribution gave some peoples the advantages in agriculture and hence population density that they needed to conquer others, and most interestingly, led them to develop world-conquering diseases.

However, I was a little wary when the author of a science book sets out with a political aim, namely to prove that the present observed inequalities in wealth, goods and technology between peoples of the world are entirely explained by the environment. Put simply, Diamond tries to settle the 'nature-nurture' debate once and for all in the favour of nurture. While I think he makes a compelling case why Australasia never developed agriculture and the technologies that spring from it, the argument is much thinner in the case of Africa and the Americas. Why, for example, in continents that lacked suitable horses or oxen to provide mechanical power were there no attempts to develop water-wheels or windmills?

While many of Diamond's observations about the three major land-masses on Earth are undoubtedly correct, there is no reason why these could not coexist with other explanations, such as genetic differences between the capabilities and behavioural preferences of different peoples. And if they were to coexist, there is a likelihood that natural advantages would reinforce the rate at which genetic differences developed and diverged. In order to prove that the wealth differences are entirely the result of the environment, Diamond would also need to disprove that there are any genetic differences, something that he fails to do. I'm afraid that the only argument he proposes against genetic contributors, namely "because they are supported by racists", while it may be true, doesn't cut the mustard intellectually. No, he needs to demolish the genetic argument systematically, citing references from equally reputable peer-reviewed journals.

Sometimes the holes in his argument are in what is omitted, rather than in factual content (which is, by and large, impeccable). For example, he stated that the native people of New Guinea were likely more intelligent on average than native Europeans, because the former have much greater natural selection pressures placed upon them, both from the environment, and from the much higher murder rate. In doing so, of course, he avoids the possible effects of sexual selection for intelligence over the last 10000 years: in the West, the preference of women for wealthy men, who have the resources to support more children, must surely have influenced the population's genetic profile. Likewise, the harsh winters in Eurasia seem to have led to resource-storing behaviours in the North, and this ability to defer gratification, which has at least in part a genetic root, has contributed to Eurasian numeracy, inventiveness, capitalisation, finance, trade, and other behaviours that have led to us having all the 'cargo'.

In summary, this book is a notable achievement, and a very worthwhile read. However, while it contributes much to the debate on the varying fortunes of the peoples on different continents, it fails in its political aim, that of proving that genetic differences have played no part in the matter.

Plants, animals and farming, 28 Jun 2008
Have you ever wondered why the world has developed the way that it has? Why some cultures and peoples seem to have prospered better than, or even at the expense of, others? If so, Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond is a book I would recommend to you. It is deeply thought provoking and well written, squeezing a history of humankind's development over the past 13,000 years into around 400 pages, which, as Diamond points out, is about 150 years per page, so not a small feat.

The basic premise of the book is that all of the worlds more advanced societies, including both those still present today and those that have disappeared into history, needed a set of complementary enablers (Ultimate Factors) to be present to allow them to develop from the original state of hunter-gatherers, from which base all people originally started. The thing that surprised me about this was just how short this list of required enablers is and as a result just how unlikely/fortunate it was that many different and varied societies did develop at all.

From the Ultimate factors, Diamond draws out a series of sequential proximate factors that lead to such historical events as European settlers not managing to settle the vast majority of the African continent or New Guinea, the decimation of the original inhabitants of North America - mostly through diseases introduced from the Old World. And, many more.

In brief, a selection of these factors include:

*The geography of any given area and the plant and animal species supported; how many of the originally wild animal species would prove suitable for domestication; How many wild plants would be worth planting - rather than say, going hunting?

*If you had enough plants and animals to domesticate, would you give up being a hunter gatherer?

*If you became a farming society would you produce enough spare food to support none-food producing crafts; politicians and artisans?

*If you did support none-food producing peoples would this eventually lead to a large dense and sedentary society etc etc

One of the many things that I really liked about this book was that it is not written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, which is very refreshing. Further, although the book isn't, I believe, intended to be a scientific text on the matter, Diamond does provide extensive references for further reading should anyone wish to do so.

I read this book having (relatively) recently finished reading Pathfinders by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and found the two books to be very complementary. I would recommend this book and Pathfinders to anyone with an interest in history, politics or humanity in general.


Enlightening, 30 May 2008
Wow. Well I have always wondered in the back of my mind why the continents have spanned out as they have, and as only great scientists can Mr Diamond has got round to answering in a hugely ambitious and incredibly fact-filled fascinating book.

I can't really say anything that hasn't been said here already but most importantly for me this book has reignited a passion for human history in me and that is achievement enough.

After the TV series, a great accompaniment, 14 Sep 2008
I am a massive fan of the tribe TV series, and it only seemed logical to get the book after watching it, so after receiving it I sat down and read the whole thing through, which was no challenge due to the books fantastic writing and incisive reporting.

The best aspect I found was that the book does not re-tell the series, more so it fills in the background for each tribe, the people behind the series, and the events that were either not captured on camera or deemed not suitable for broadcast - it delves into the less glamorous side of filming, the ailments, the problems, the danger, while keeping the nostalgic story of each tribe intact

A superb read and as stated above, a great partner to the TV series

The World's Most Dangerous Thought Experiment, 24 Dec 2008
(1) Diamond bravely puts his reputation on the block here. He tries to determine just why there has always been those well-known haves and have nots, both across history and still to this day.

(2) Diamond uses many disciplines in his analysis - anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, biology/microbiology, history, epidemiology, migrational studies, immunology, history of medicine, the history of technology etc.

(3) He argues that the scientific, technological, engineering, medical, architectural, mathematical and other such achievements and innovations of certain races of humankind (white skinned and brown skinned) are no more than a matter of geographical luck and being in the right place at the right time.

(4) There is no more to it than that. It's not a matter of sheer mental talents, astonishing scientific and mathematical creative gifts, amazing minds, boundless brilliance, a lack of indolence. It's certainly not due to a congenitally superior intellect. It's nothing to do with the ability to think deeply, with sheer power, intricacy, subtlety and finesse and the drive to work and think hard.

(5) What this often unintentionally funny book basically suggests to me is that its readers run a very dangerous thought experiment. Would you like to try my thought experiment here and now? Let's go.

(6) First, run back the clock of time. Run it back to the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens. Now take the 4 major racial types: Australoids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids. Remove the second group from the face of the Earth, forever.

(7) Now run history forward with what you've got. Do we have 2 space probes that have left the solar system? Cell phones? FED or SED Television? Computers? Software? The Internet? Bose-Einstein condensates? Broadcasting? Immensely complex broadcast equipment and receivers? DAB radio? Newspapers? The microchip? Recording and mixing desks? Blu-ray DVD players? Inoculations? The Airbus A380? The Large Hadron Collider? Gravitational wave experiments? Robots on Mars and a probe on a moon of Saturn? Do we have GPS satellites that take the Theory of Relativity into account? Cities? Sanitation? Highways? Bridges? Schools? The combustion engine? Machinery? Space probes that take gravitational sling-shots from planets? Ground and space telescopes? Manufacturing? Electricity? Nuclear energy? The modern battery? Trains and railways? Nanotechnology? Atomic clocks? Add to the list yourself - because there's a lot. Isn't there?

(8) Do we have the astonishing, colossal and stupendous scientific, engineering, mathematical, architectural, medical, surgical, medical scientific and technological achievements made upon the Earth to date?

(9) Would we even end up with the book or the wheel by 2010?

(10) Do we have a rich history, with a Euler, an Einstein, an Ed Witten, a Carl Friedrich Gauss, a Marie Curie, Bohr, Born, James Clerk-Maxwell, Watson & Crick & Wilkins & Rosalind Franklin, Darwin, Davy, Lise Meitner, Euclid, Archimedes, Faraday, Kepler, Newton, Robert Boyle? Poincare, Charles Lyell, Mendel, Oppenheimer, Planck, Boltzmann, Pauli, Heisenberg, Shrodinger, Rutherford, Dirac, Feynman, Hawking, Pauling, Lavosier, Mendeleev, Dalton, David Hilbert, Galois, Riemann, Ramanujan, Wheeler, Galileo Galilei, da Vinci, Helmholtz, William Thomson, Clausius, Willard Gibbs, Walther Nernst, Turing, Godel, Wittgenstein, Berners-Lee, Hubble, Kaluza-Klein, Pasteur, Gell-Mann, Veneziano, Michio Kaku, Sadi Carnot, Robert Mayer, Eddington, Fermi, Chandrasekhar, Lisa Randall? Google great architects, engineers, famous geologists, pioneering surgeons and other such people too ... add to the list.

(11) Would we really have all this astonishing mental achievement and all these great outcomes? To me the answer is clearly NO. We would not be even close.

(12) Jared Diamond argues differently. Read his book. Then sit down and run, in your own head, the world's most dangerous thought experiment ...

Interesting read, 21 Nov 2008
This book seemed to be on dsplay in bookshops at around the same time as "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" by David Landes. Whereas David Landes is an economic historian, Jared Diamond is an anthropologist and geographer.

Having read both books, it struck me that there were often two competing explanations for the same phenemona. I think each author should moderate the others views. I think that both authors have a tendency to push their own pet theories a little further than they really ought to go and perhaps it would be better to take the best insights from both approaches and combine them into a bigger explanation than arguing about 'what came first - the chicken or the egg?'.

Diamond combines grand overarching theories with detailed discussions of such topics as the way in which various plants and animals were first domesticated.

Altogether a compelling read but one has to take it with a pinch of salt.



Good history, but not the complete story?, 12 Nov 2008
At the simple level, this book is a tour de force of the history and geography of mankind, and of how the latter has helped to shape the former. It is a book that everybody should read, if only to counterbalance the eurocentric versions of world history that dominate the bookshelves. Diamond explains how accidents of plant and animal distribution gave some peoples the advantages in agriculture and hence population density that they needed to conquer others, and most interestingly, led them to develop world-conquering diseases.

However, I was a little wary when the author of a science book sets out with a political aim, namely to prove that the present observed inequalities in wealth, goods and technology between peoples of the world are entirely explained by the environment. Put simply, Diamond tries to settle the 'nature-nurture' debate once and for all in the favour of nurture. While I think he makes a compelling case why Australasia never developed agriculture and the technologies that spring from it, the argument is much thinner in the case of Africa and the Americas. Why, for example, in continents that lacked suitable horses or oxen to provide mechanical power were there no attempts to develop water-wheels or windmills?

While many of Diamond's observations about the three major land-masses on Earth are undoubtedly correct, there is no reason why these could not coexist with other explanations, such as genetic differences between the capabilities and behavioural preferences of different peoples. And if they were to coexist, there is a likelihood that natural advantages would reinforce the rate at which genetic differences developed and diverged. In order to prove that the wealth differences are entirely the result of the environment, Diamond would also need to disprove that there are any genetic differences, something that he fails to do. I'm afraid that the only argument he proposes against genetic contributors, namely "because they are supported by racists", while it may be true, doesn't cut the mustard intellectually. No, he needs to demolish the genetic argument systematically, citing references from equally reputable peer-reviewed journals.

Sometimes the holes in his argument are in what is omitted, rather than in factual content (which is, by and large, impeccable). For example, he stated that the native people of New Guinea were likely more intelligent on average than native Europeans, because the former have much greater natural selection pressures placed upon them, both from the environment, and from the much higher murder rate. In doing so, of course, he avoids the possible effects of sexual selection for intelligence over the last 10000 years: in the West, the preference of women for wealthy men, who have the resources to support more children, must surely have influenced the population's genetic profile. Likewise, the harsh winters in Eurasia seem to have led to resource-storing behaviours in the North, and this ability to defer gratification, which has at least in part a genetic root, has contributed to Eurasian numeracy, inventiveness, capitalisation, finance, trade, and other behaviours that have led to us having all the 'cargo'.

In summary, this book is a notable achievement, and a very worthwhile read. However, while it contributes much to the debate on the varying fortunes of the peoples on different continents, it fails in its political aim, that of proving that genetic differences have played no part in the matter.

Plants, animals and farming, 28 Jun 2008
Have you ever wondered why the world has developed the way that it has? Why some cultures and peoples seem to have prospered better than, or even at the expense of, others? If so, Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond is a book I would recommend to you. It is deeply thought provoking and well written, squeezing a history of humankind's development over the past 13,000 years into around 400 pages, which, as Diamond points out, is about 150 years per page, so not a small feat.

The basic premise of the book is that all of the worlds more advanced societies, including both those still present today and those that have disappeared into history, needed a set of complementary enablers (Ultimate Factors) to be present to allow them to develop from the original state of hunter-gatherers, from which base all people originally started. The thing that surprised me about this was just how short this list of required enablers is and as a result just how unlikely/fortunate it was that many different and varied societies did develop at all.

From the Ultimate factors, Diamond draws out a series of sequential proximate factors that lead to such historical events as European settlers not managing to settle the vast majority of the African continent or New Guinea, the decimation of the original inhabitants of North America - mostly through diseases introduced from the Old World. And, many more.

In brief, a selection of these factors include:

*The geography of any given area and the plant and animal species supported; how many of the originally wild animal species would prove suitable for domestication; How many wild plants would be worth planting - rather than say, going hunting?

*If you had enough plants and animals to domesticate, would you give up being a hunter gatherer?

*If you became a farming society would you produce enough spare food to support none-food producing crafts; politicians and artisans?

*If you did support none-food producing peoples would this eventually lead to a large dense and sedentary society etc etc

One of the many things that I really liked about this book was that it is not written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, which is very refreshing. Further, although the book isn't, I believe, intended to be a scientific text on the matter, Diamond does provide extensive references for further reading should anyone wish to do so.

I read this book having (relatively) recently finished reading Pathfinders by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and found the two books to be very complementary. I would recommend this book and Pathfinders to anyone with an interest in history, politics or humanity in general.


Enlightening, 30 May 2008
Wow. Well I have always wondered in the back of my mind why the continents have spanned out as they have, and as only great scientists can Mr Diamond has got round to answering in a hugely ambitious and incredibly fact-filled fascinating book.

I can't really say anything that hasn't been said here already but most importantly for me this book has reignited a passion for human history in me and that is achievement enough.

After the TV series, a great accompaniment, 14 Sep 2008
I am a massive fan of the tribe TV series, and it only seemed logical to get the book after watching it, so after receiving it I sat down and read the whole thing through, which was no challenge due to the books fantastic writing and incisive reporting.

The best aspect I found was that the book does not re-tell the series, more so it fills in the background for each tribe, the people behind the series, and the events that were either not captured on camera or deemed not suitable for broadcast - it delves into the less glamorous side of filming, the ailments, the problems, the danger, while keeping the nostalgic story of each tribe intact

A superb read and as stated above, a great partner to the TV series

looks like axl and writes like axl, 20 Sep 2008

"It's odd," David Foster Wallace once said. "I don't really think of myself that much as a writer."
I can't be bothered wasting my time on a considered examination of this man's prose.
He went to that lobster event and all he got out of it was one long whinge about the pain of the lobster.
He is dull , colourless and uninteresting as a writer.
No colour , no life. Lots of footnotes.

Consider the Genius., 14 Dec 2007
I finished Consider The Lobster by the US writer David Foster Wallace a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, it's now back at the library, so I can't refer to it when writing this, but I wanted to sing the praises of DFW a little. OK, a lot.

DFW first came to my attention when his epic novel Infinite Jest was published in 1996. I was blown away by the irreverence and wit of this author; the way he wore his attitude on his sleeve like a young Martin Amis. To my shame, a demanding job meant I put the book aside because I couldn't give it the attention it deserved, but I'm going to tackle it again sometime when my arm muscles are strong.(The paperback edition runs to 1080 pages of teeny tiny type.)

Subsequently, I forgot about him for a few years. Then, a couple of years ago,I borrowed Brief Interviews With Hideous Men from the library. This is one of DFW's collections of short stories, and I highly recommend it. He brings to life several ghastly characters who will make you laugh and cringe simultaneously.

One attribute of DFW's that I find unique to him is that he makes an art form of being long winded. He is a master of the footnote, and often, there's a footnote on every page in his work, with the footnote being as long as the page. Yet he is never tedious to read - on the contrary, he is refreshingly easy to consume, partly due to his dazzling ability to write and partly because there's something endearing about the way he has to explain every little point. The latter attribute means that he leads off on tangents the whole time, and the tangents have tangents too. (I'm not joking - sometimes the footnotes have footnotes). But he is definitely worth discovering. Brief Interviews is a collection that most serious readers will gobble up; the mix of dry humour and talanted eloquence being almost intoxicating.

Consider The Lobster is a collection of essays from the late '90s and early noughties. The opening one is a foray into the world of pornography: DFW attends a mega porn award show in order to write about it. The weird, twisted world of porn is accurately nailed and the reader comes away with conflicting feelings including disgust, contempt, pity and sadness.

My favourite essay was the one where DFW joins the press entourage following the Republican candidate John McCain in the last US elections. DFW writes as an impartial observer, freely admitting he voted Democrat in the election. The essay brings the world of US politics sharply into focus. The most revealing parts are those outlining the dirty tricks played by the George Dubya Bush team. Because DFW is actually on the campaign trail, following the Straight Talk Express (McCain's tour bus), there is a sense of comtemporaneous following of the trail. I found it fascinating.

The essay that gives the collection its title, Consider The Lobster,which is a piece about a major annual lobster festival in Maine, is also full of food (ouch) for thought. DFW is not a journalist who covers only the superficial aspect of a subject - he pokes around in the little niches and dark corners where other writers fear to venture. His matter-of-fact and intelligent musing on the myths we are fed about lobsters' ability to feel pain will certainly make me think before eating lobster again. The fact that he is so scrupulously researched, so damned clever, means that you want to keep reading, unlike many simplistic pro-animal rights individuals who shove partisan views down one's throat in such a biased not to mention uninformed and inaccurate way that it makes you want to avoid the issue totally. The great thing about reading DFW is that it's like listening to an incredibly bright friend give their opinion on issues in an entertaining way.

The only reason I gave this collection four stars rather than five was because of the slightly esoteric subjects covered and the fact that I tend to prefer fiction to non fiction. But DFW is probably the young (under 50) writer I would most like to be stuck in a pub with.

****0

Not Perfect, but Awfully Good, 04 Nov 2006
I've never read Wallace, mostly because his best known work ("Infinite Jest") is so long. But I tend to like writers that digress and use footnotes for asides, so I thought maybe this collection of ten essays would give me enough of a taste to know if I should check out his other stuff. Ranging in length from 7 to 80 pages, the essays all appeared previously (albeit often truncated) in various magazines such as Harper's, The Atlantic, Gourmet, Rolling Stone, Premier, etc. They can be roughly categorized into three categories: brief review, personal piece, and long in-depth topical examination.

The brief reviews generally tend to take an item and use it as a staging area for discussing something more interesting than the given subject. For example, in "Certainly the End of Something or Other", Wallace uses his review of John Updike's novel Toward the End of Time to highlight the general narcissism and shallowness of writers such as Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. His 20-page review of Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoevsky is largely dedicated to making a larger point about literary criticism, and his 25-page review of tennis player Tracy Austin's autobiography is similarly dedicated to identifying the fundamental problem of sports memoirs. I have to admit that the essential point of the shortest piece, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness", eluded me.

The two more personal pieces are strikingly different, but in each one gets a vivid impression of Wallace working through his own feelings. In, "The View From Mrs. Thompson's", he uses 13 pages to recount his own September 11 experience in Bloomington, Indiana. As one reads of the mysterious sprouting of flags, Wallace's hunt for a flag of his own, and his spending the day watching the footage with old ladies who've never been to New York, his mounting alienation from his neighbors is fascinating. The titular story is ostensibly a standard travel piece on a Maine lobster festival, but rapidly evolves into a thoughtful meditation (with scientific research) on the ethics of preparing and eating lobster.

The four in-depth essays are the real stars of the book, in each Wallace gets deep into his material and wallows in it with intellectual vigor and above all, wit. In the 50-page "Big Red Son", he covers the porn Oscars and emerges with scenes and quotes so surreal they must be true. Over the course of the 50-page "Authority and American Usage", he takes a topic close to his heart as a writing instructor and provides a layman's overview of the Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist "usage wars". The underbelly of political campaigning is exposed in the 80-page "Up Simba", detailing his week on the John McCain's 2000 campaign trail -- the ultimate lesson is that if you want the most astute and nuanced political analysis, turn to the camera and sound techs, not the journos. Finally, the 70-page "Host" takes us into the world of talk radio, via a profile of an LA radio personality. All of these long pieces are wonderful (albeit in very different ways), as they allow Wallace's intellect the space to range free and elaborate.

Ultimately, it's not hard to see why Wallace is a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award-winner. His combination of smarts, thoughtfulness, self-awareness, wit, and ability to write killer prose simply can't be ignored. One does have to raise an eyebrow at his overuse of footnotes, however. While I'm a big fan of footnotes (yes, even in fiction), I find Wallace's use of footnotes within footnotes rather tiresome (not to mention tough on the eyes). In many instances, it seems like the material could have been handled much more elegantly within the text, or within a parenthetical. This is especially true of "Host", which is very nearly ruined by the attempt to use boxed text and arrows to replace footnotes. There's no textual reason for the method, and the experiment doesn't work at all, only serving to highlight the unnecessary divisions of information and reducing their navigability.

Although a few of the pieces failed to totally captivate me, and the overfootnoting grated (especially in it's final iteration), this is still a highly entertaining and enlightening book. Chuck Klosterman's essays are like potato chips -- yummy, hard to stop at just one, and not super filling. Wallace's are generally a full nutritious meal at your favorite restaurant.

Rewires your synapses, 14 Feb 2006
I love Wallace's novels and short stories, but in my opinion his intellect sometimes impedes his storytelling. I like my books smart, but Wallace's footnotes and in-jokes and surely-you-all-know-this-as-well-as-I-do type en passant references can be a bit over the cerebral top. But what can be annoying in fiction, works far better in the essay format. His quirky and brainy and alienated reporter persona seems to me a perfect position from which to comment on the current state of affairs in such diverse spheres as porn, literature, US language, electoral campaigns, lobster festivals and conservative talk radio. His hyper-reflexive analyses are wonderfully mind-bending, his command of language supreme, and his uneasy embeddedness in real-world situations both touching and very very funny. Wallace at his essayistic best rewires your synapses and vastly expands your neural nets. You should definitely go for it.

The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer's in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian aborigines. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature that underlies this tale of trekking across the outback gives it a resonance found in few other recent travel books. A poignancy, as well, since Chatwin's untimely death made The Songlines one of his last books.

The World's Most Dangerous Thought Experiment, 24 Dec 2008
(1) Diamond bravely puts his reputation on the block here. He tries to determine just why there has always been those well-known haves and have nots, both across history and still to this day.

(2) Diamond uses many disciplines in his analysis - anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, biology/microbiology, history, epidemiology, migrational studies, immunology, history of medicine, the history of technology etc.

(3) He argues that the scientific, technological, engineering, medical, architectural, mathematical and other such achievements and innovations of certain races of humankind (white skinned and brown skinned) are no more than a matter of geographical luck and being in the right place at the right time.

(4) There is no more to it than that. It's not a matter of sheer mental talents, astonishing scientific and mathematical creative gifts, amazing minds, boundless brilliance, a lack of indolence. It's certainly not due to a congenitally superior intellect. It's nothing to do with the ability to think deeply, with sheer power, intricacy, subtlety and finesse and the drive to work and think hard.

(5) What this often unintentionally funny book basically suggests to me is that its readers run a very dangerous thought experiment. Would you like to try my thought experiment here and now? Let's go.

(6) First, run back the clock of time. Run it back to the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens. Now take the 4 major racial types: Australoids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids. Remove the second group from the face of the Earth, forever.

(7) Now run history forward with what you've got. Do we have 2 space probes that have left the solar system? Cell phones? FED or SED Television? Computers? Software? The Internet? Bose-Einstein condensates? Broadcasting? Immensely complex broadcast equipment and receivers? DAB radio? Newspapers? The microchip? Recording and mixing desks? Blu-ray DVD players? Inoculations? The Airbus A380? The Large Hadron Collider? Gravitational wave experiments? Robots on Mars and a probe on a moon of Saturn? Do we have GPS satellites that take the Theory of Relativity into account? Cities? Sanitation? Highways? Bridges? Schools? The combustion engine? Machinery? Space probes that take gravitational sling-shots from planets? Ground and space telescopes? Manufacturing? Electricity? Nuclear energy? The modern battery? Trains and railways? Nanotechnology? Atomic clocks? Add to the list yourself - because there's a lot. Isn't there?

(8) Do we have the astonishing, colossal and stupendous scientific, engineering, mathematical, architectural, medical, surgical, medical scientific and technological achievements made upon the Earth to date?

(9) Would we even end up with the book or the wheel by 2010?

(10) Do we have a rich history, with a Euler, an Einstein, an Ed Witten, a Carl Friedrich Gauss, a Marie Curie, Bohr, Born, James Clerk-Maxwell, Watson & Crick & Wilkins & Rosalind Franklin, Darwin, Davy, Lise Meitner, Euclid, Archimedes, Faraday, Kepler, Newton, Robert Boyle? Poincare, Charles Lyell, Mendel, Oppenheimer, Planck, Boltzmann, Pauli, Heisenberg, Shrodinger, Rutherford, Dirac, Feynman, Hawking, Pauling, Lavosier, Mendeleev, Dalton, David Hilbert, Galois, Riemann, Ramanujan, Wheeler, Galileo Galilei, da Vinci, Helmholtz, William Thomson, Clausius, Willard Gibbs, Walther Nernst, Turing, Godel, Wittgenstein, Berners-Lee, Hubble, Kaluza-Klein, Pasteur, Gell-Mann, Veneziano, Michio Kaku, Sadi Carnot, Robert Mayer, Eddington, Fermi, Chandrasekhar, Lisa Randall? Google great architects, engineers, famous geologists, pioneering surgeons and other such people too ... add to the list.

(11) Would we really have all this astonishing mental achievement and all these great outcomes? To me the answer is clearly NO. We would not be even close.

(12) Jared Diamond argues differently. Read his book. Then sit down and run, in your own head, the world's most dangerous thought experiment ...

Interesting read, 21 Nov 2008
This book seemed to be on dsplay in bookshops at around the same time as "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" by David Landes. Whereas David Landes is an economic historian, Jared Diamond is an anthropologist and geographer.

Having read both books, it struck me that there were often two competing explanations for the same phenemona. I think each author should moderate the others views. I think that both authors have a tendency to push their own pet theories a little further than they really ought to go and perhaps it would be better to take the best insights from both approaches and combine them into a bigger explanation than arguing about 'what came first - the chicken or the egg?'.

Diamond combines grand overarching theories with detailed discussions of such topics as the way in which various plants and animals were first domesticated.

Altogether a compelling read but one has to take it with a pinch of salt.



Good history, but not the complete story?, 12 Nov 2008
At the simple level, this book is a tour de force of the history and geography of mankind, and of how the latter has helped to shape the former. It is a book that everybody should read, if only to counterbalance the eurocentric versions of world history that dominate the bookshelves. Diamond explains how accidents of plant and animal distribution gave some peoples the advantages in agriculture and hence population density that they needed to conquer others, and most interestingly, led them to develop world-conquering diseases.

However, I was a little wary when the author of a science book sets out with a political aim, namely to prove that the present observed inequalities in wealth, goods and technology between peoples of the world are entirely explained by the environment. Put simply, Diamond tries to settle the 'nature-nurture' debate once and for all in the favour of nurture. While I think he makes a compelling case why Australasia never developed agriculture and the technologies that spring from it, the argument is much thinner in the case of Africa and the Americas. Why, for example, in continents that lacked suitable horses or oxen to provide mechanical power were there no attempts to develop water-wheels or windmills?

While many of Diamond's observations about the three major land-masses on Earth are undoubtedly correct, there is no reason why these could not coexist with other explanations, such as genetic differences between the capabilities and behavioural preferences of different peoples. And if they were to coexist, there is a likelihood that natural advantages would reinforce the rate at which genetic differences developed and diverged. In order to prove that the wealth differences are entirely the result of the environment, Diamond would also need to disprove that there are any genetic differences, something that he fails to do. I'm afraid that the only argument he proposes against genetic contributors, namely "because they are supported by racists", while it may be true, doesn't cut the mustard intellectually. No, he needs to demolish the genetic argument systematically, citing references from equally reputable peer-reviewed journals.

Sometimes the holes in his argument are in what is omitted, rather than in factual content (which is, by and large, impeccable). For example, he stated that the native people of New Guinea were likely more intelligent on average than native Europeans, because the former have much greater natural selection pressures placed upon them, both from the environment, and from the much higher murder rate. In doing so, of course, he avoids the possible effects of sexual selection for intelligence over the last 10000 years: in the West, the preference of women for wealthy men, who have the resources to support more children, must surely have influenced the population's genetic profile. Likewise, the harsh winters in Eurasia seem to have led to resource-storing behaviours in the North, and this ability to defer gratification, which has at least in part a genetic root, has contributed to Eurasian numeracy, inventiveness, capitalisation, finance, trade, and other behaviours that have led to us having all the 'cargo'.

In summary, this book is a notable achievement, and a very worthwhile read. However, while it contributes much to the debate on the varying fortunes of the peoples on different continents, it fails in its political aim, that of proving that genetic differences have played no part in the matter.

Plants, animals and farming, 28 Jun 2008
Have you ever wondered why the world has developed the way that it has? Why some cultures and peoples seem to have prospered better than, or even at the expense of, others? If so, Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond is a book I would recommend to you. It is deeply thought provoking and well written, squeezing a history of humankind's development over the past 13,000 years into around 400 pages, which, as Diamond points out, is about 150 years per page, so not a small feat.

The basic premise of the book is that all of the worlds more advanced societies, including both those still present today and those that have disappeared into history, needed a set of complementary enablers (Ultimate Factors) to be present to allow them to develop from the original state of hunter-gatherers, from which base all people originally started. The thing that surprised me about this was just how short this list of required enablers is and as a result just how unlikely/fortunate it was that many different and varied societies did develop at all.

From the Ultimate factors, Diamond draws out a series of sequential proximate factors that lead to such historical events as European settlers not managing to settle the vast majority of the African continent or New Guinea, the decimation of the original inhabitants of North America - mostly through diseases introduced from the Old World. And, many more.

In brief, a selection of these factors include:

*The geography of any given area and the plant and animal species supported; how many of the originally wild animal species would prove suitable for domestication; How many wild plants would be worth planting - rather than say, going hunting?

*If you had enough plants and animals to domesticate, would you give up being a hunter gatherer?

*If you became a farming society would you produce enough spare food to support none-food producing crafts; politicians and artisans?

*If you did support none-food producing peoples would this eventually lead to a large dense and sedentary society etc etc

One of the many things that I really liked about this book was that it is not written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, which is very refreshing. Further, although the book isn't, I believe, intended to be a scientific text on the matter, Diamond does provide extensive references for further reading should anyone wish to do so.

I read this book having (relatively) recently finished reading Pathfinders by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and found the two books to be very complementary. I would recommend this book and Pathfinders to anyone with an interest in history, politics or humanity in general.


Enlightening, 30 May 2008
Wow. Well I have always wondered in the back of my mind why the continents have spanned out as they have, and as only great scientists can Mr Diamond has got round to answering in a hugely ambitious and incredibly fact-filled fascinating book.

I can't really say anything that hasn't been said here already but most importantly for me this book has reignited a passion for human history in me and that is achievement enough.

After the TV series, a great accompaniment, 14 Sep 2008
I am a massive fan of the tribe TV series, and it only seemed logical to get the book after watching it, so after receiving it I sat down and read the whole thing through, which was no challenge due to the books fantastic writing and incisive reporting.

The best aspect I found was that the book does not re-tell the series, more so it fills in the background for each tribe, the people behind the series, and the events that were either not captured on camera or deemed not suitable for broadcast - it delves into the less glamorous side of filming, the ailments, the problems, the danger, while keeping the nostalgic story of each tribe intact

A superb read and as stated above, a great partner to the TV series

looks like axl and writes like axl, 20 Sep 2008

"It's odd," David Foster Wallace once said. "I don't really think of myself that much as a writer."
I can't be bothered wasting my time on a considered examination of this man's prose.
He went to that lobster event and all he got out of it was one long whinge about the pain of the lobster.
He is dull , colourless and uninteresting as a writer.
No colour , no life. Lots of footnotes.

Consider the Genius., 14 Dec 2007
I finished Consider The Lobster by the US writer David Foster Wallace a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, it's now back at the library, so I can't refer to it when writing this, but I wanted to sing the praises of DFW a little. OK, a lot.

DFW first came to my attention when his epic novel Infinite Jest was published in 1996. I was blown away by the irreverence and wit of this author; the way he wore his attitude on his sleeve like a young Martin Amis. To my shame, a demanding job meant I put the book aside because I couldn't give it the attention it deserved, but I'm going to tackle it again sometime when my arm muscles are strong.(The paperback edition runs to 1080 pages of teeny tiny type.)

Subsequently, I forgot about him for a few years. Then, a couple of years ago,I borrowed Brief Interviews With Hideous Men from the library. This is one of DFW's collections of short stories, and I highly recommend it. He brings to life several ghastly characters who will make you laugh and cringe simultaneously.

One attribute of DFW's that I find unique to him is that he makes an art form of being long winded. He is a master of the footnote, and often, there's a footnote on every page in his work, with the footnote being as long as the page. Yet he is never tedious to read - on the contrary, he is refreshingly easy to consume, partly due to his dazzling ability to write and partly because there's something endearing about the way he has to explain every little point. The latter attribute means that he leads off on tangents the whole time, and the tangents have tangents too. (I'm not joking - sometimes the footnotes have footnotes). But he is definitely worth discovering. Brief Interviews is a collection that most serious readers will gobble up; the mix of dry humour and talanted eloquence being almost intoxicating.

Consider The Lobster is a collection of essays from the late '90s and early noughties. The opening one is a foray into the world of pornography: DFW attends a mega porn award show in order to write about it. The weird, twisted world of porn is accurately nailed and the reader comes away with conflicting feelings including disgust, contempt, pity and sadness.

My favourite essay was the one where DFW joins the press entourage following the Republican candidate John McCain in the last US elections. DFW writes as an impartial observer, freely admitting he voted Democrat in the election. The essay brings the world of US politics sharply into focus. The most revealing parts are those outlining the dirty tricks played by the George Dubya Bush team. Because DFW is actually on the campaign trail, following the Straight Talk Express (McCain's tour bus), there is a sense of comtemporaneous following of the trail. I found it fascinating.

The essay that gives the collection its title, Consider The Lobster,which is a piece about a major annual lobster festival in Maine, is also full of food (ouch) for thought. DFW is not a journalist who covers only the superficial aspect of a subject - he pokes around in the little niches and dark corners where other writers fear to venture. His matter-of-fact and intelligent musing on the myths we are fed about lobsters' ability to feel pain will certainly make me think before eating lobster again. The fact that he is so scrupulously researched, so damned clever, means that you want to keep reading, unlike many simplistic pro-animal rights individuals who shove partisan views down one's throat in such a biased not to mention uninformed and inaccurate way that it makes you want to avoid the issue totally. The great thing about reading DFW is that it's like listening to an incredibly bright friend give their opinion on issues in an entertaining way.

The only reason I gave this collection four stars rather than five was because of the slightly esoteric subjects covered and the fact that I tend to prefer fiction to non fiction. But DFW is probably the young (under 50) writer I would most like to be stuck in a pub with.

****0

Not Perfect, but Awfully Good, 04 Nov 2006
I've never read Wallace, mostly because his best known work ("Infinite Jest") is so long. But I tend to like writers that digress and use footnotes for asides, so I thought maybe this collection of ten essays would give me enough of a taste to know if I should check out his other stuff. Ranging in length from 7 to 80 pages, the essays all appeared previously (albeit often truncated) in various magazines such as Harper's, The Atlantic, Gourmet, Rolling Stone, Premier, etc. They can be roughly categorized into three categories: brief review, personal piece, and long in-depth topical examination.

The brief reviews generally tend to take an item and use it as a staging area for discussing something more interesting than the given subject. For example, in "Certainly the End of Something or Other", Wallace uses his review of John Updike's novel Toward the End of Time to highlight the general narcissism and shallowness of writers such as Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. His 20-page review of Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoevsky is largely dedicated to making a larger point about literary criticism, and his 25-page review of tennis player Tracy Austin's autobiography is similarly dedicated to identifying the fundamental problem of sports memoirs. I have to admit that the essential point of the shortest piece, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness", eluded me.

The two more personal pieces are strikingly different, but in each one gets a vivid impression of Wallace working through his own feelings. In, "The View From Mrs. Thompson's", he uses 13 pages to recount his own September 11 experience in Bloomington, Indiana. As one reads of the mysterious sprouting of flags, Wallace's hunt for a flag of his own, and his spending the day watching the footage with old ladies who've never been to New York, his mounting alienation from his neighbors is fascinating. The titular story is ostensibly a standard travel piece on a Maine lobster festival, but rapidly evolves into a thoughtful meditation (with scientific research) on the ethics of preparing and eating lobster.

The four in-depth essays are the real stars of the book, in each Wallace gets deep into his material and wallows in it with intellectual vigor and above all, wit. In the 50-page "Big Red Son", he covers the porn Oscars and emerges with scenes and quotes so surreal they must be true. Over the course of the 50-page "Authority and American Usage", he takes a topic close to his heart as a writing instructor and provides a layman's overview of the Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist "usage wars". The underbelly of political campaigning is exposed in the 80-page "Up Simba", detailing his week on the John McCain's 2000 campaign trail -- the ultimate lesson is that if you want the most astute and nuanced political analysis, turn to the camera and sound techs, not the journos. Finally, the 70-page "Host" takes us into the world of talk radio, via a profile of an LA radio personality. All of these long pieces are wonderful (albeit in very different ways), as they allow Wallace's intellect the space to range free and elaborate.

Ultimately, it's not hard to see why Wallace is a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award-winner. His combination of smarts, thoughtfulness, self-awareness, wit, and ability to write killer prose simply can't be ignored. One does have to raise an eyebrow at his overuse of footnotes, however. While I'm a big fan of footnotes (yes, even in fiction), I find Wallace's use of footnotes within footnotes rather tiresome (not to mention tough on the eyes). In many instances, it seems like the material could have been handled much more elegantly within the text, or within a parenthetical. This is especially true of "Host", which is very nearly ruined by the attempt to use boxed text and arrows to replace footnotes. There's no textual reason for the method, and the experiment doesn't work at all, only serving to highlight the unnecessary divisions of information and reducing their navigability.

Although a few of the pieces failed to totally captivate me, and the overfootnoting grated (especially in it's final iteration), this is still a highly entertaining and enlightening book. Chuck Klosterman's essays are like potato chips -- yummy, hard to stop at just one, and not super filling. Wallace's are generally a full nutritious meal at your favorite restaurant.

Rewires your synapses, 14 Feb 2006
I love Wallace's novels and short stories, but in my opinion his intellect sometimes impedes his storytelling. I like my books smart, but Wallace's footnotes and in-jokes and surely-you-all-know-this-as-well-as-I-do type en passant references can be a bit over the cerebral top. But what can be annoying in fiction, works far better in the essay format. His quirky and brainy and alienated reporter persona seems to me a perfect position from which to comment on the current state of affairs in such diverse spheres as porn, literature, US language, electoral campaigns, lobster festivals and conservative talk radio. His hyper-reflexive analyses are wonderfully mind-bending, his command of language supreme, and his uneasy embeddedness in real-world situations both touching and very very funny. Wallace at his essayistic best rewires your synapses and vastly expands your neural nets. You should definitely go for it.

The human tide, 25 Jul 2007
This is a unique and unclassifiable book, part novel, part travel book, part notebook full of quotations and speculations. Chatwin focuses on the notion that language and human thought began in songs that sang the landscape and living things into existence. Aboriginal culture continues this tradition in songlines which are explored as living entities, maps, boundaries, calendars, catalogues, survival systems, myths. Chatwin says the ultimate question he is asking is, why are humans so restless? He argues that this is the ultimate human quality. We are nomadic in our core. He quotes a European tramp: "It's like the tides were pulling you along the highway. I'm like the Arctic tern, guv'nor...what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again." This book doesn't provide answers. Indeed it plunges into even wider speculations about war, prehistory, mythology and culture. But it goes far beyond the predictable "Aboriginal wisdom for the westerner" that I expected. A fascinating, difficult, but intriguing book.

Aboriginals in Australia, 13 Mar 2007
In Alice Springs the narrator called Bruce meets Arkady Volchok, an Australian citizen who is mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals. Arkady is fascinated by them, by their grit and tenacity and their ways of dealing with white people. Arkady speaks a couple of their languages and he is often astounded by their intellectual vigour, their memory and their capacity to survive.
It was during his time as a schoolteacher in Walbiri that Arkadi learned of the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as Songlines - a way for Aboriginals to sing out the name of everything that crosses their path during their wanderings: birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes and so sing the world in existence.
When a route is suggested for a new Alice to Darwin railway line, Arkady's job is to identify the traditional landowners, to drive them over their old hunting grounds and to get them to reveal which rock or soak or ghost-gum is the work of a Dreamtime hero. Bruce is happy to join Arkady and to spend some time "out bush".
The reader of this novel learns a lot about Australia and the Aboriginals. The plot and the characters however are a bit thin. One finds it hard to sympathise with the Aboriginal figures appearing in the story. What they have to say and the way they express themselves amounts to practically nothing. It seems as though they need the white people to tell their stories and traditions.


Eye-opening view into new cultural perspecitve + situation, 01 Apr 2006
A great, thoughtful read, stimulating, observing, searching for many answers.....

A mixture of philosophical thinking and suggestion, formed from insightful discoveries, and a real-life voyage of personal encounters into Australia. Fascinating revelations about the Aboriginees and their 'Songlines' - connected to mapping and navigating the country and territories. Also, their sacred mysteries, ancestors of the 'Dreamtime'.

The book holds Chatwin's passive, entertaining observations of characters + incidents, and revelatory thoughts about the nature of nomadism in mankind, across the world and back through the Ages. It finds much weight to support the memorable truth that we are not yet 'settlers' to any happy extent. Excellent body of quotations. Memorable accounts. The nature of song.

For someone not familiar with this topic, I was grateful for this intriguing introduction to these amazing, nomadic survivors, and some well-meaning, willing, attentive white friends.

Communicating through song, 09 Mar 2004
I was recommended this book by several different people, if you are interested in the 'aboriginal' culture/travelling or you think you might be then this book is for you. Although it is classically written & occasionally quite heavy I found it very interesting. Bruce Chatwin goes on a journey to study the songlines and on the way he ponders the origin of man, presenting evidence that man was originally Nomadic & also writes 3/4 chapters worth of short passages taken from all over the globe to give atmosphere to this claim, one of the most amazing facts was that an aboriginal in the far north can understand an aboriginal from the far south without understanding his language, he translates the melodies of his songs & therefore knows which path he is walking & therefore where he is from, this book has been a great help in understanding more about the ancients in OZ for me, personal accounts of cultures are always more informative than text books I find & this book is no exception :-)

Outback adventure, 29 Sep 2003
In the late 1980s, travel writer Bruce Chatwin visited the Australian outback to find out more about the songlines, the invisible pathways across the continent which connect communities and follow ancient boundaries. During his journey, he is accompanied by a Russian-born Australian, Arkady Volchok, who is mapping the sacred sites of the aborigines. Volchok proves to be a wonderful and knowledgeable host, showing Chatwin the rugged beauty of the landscape and introducing him to its many native human inhabitants.

Chatwin's writing is deceptively simple but very engaging; he captures feelings and characters so aptly that it's almost like you're on the journey with him. I thoroughly enjoyed his adventure to Alice Springs and the far north, especially his encounters with Jim Hanlon, a 73-year-old loner who wanted Chatwin to stay in a caravan "smelling of something dead" to finish his book, and Donkey Donk, an aboriginal who takes him hunting in a Ford Sedan which degenerates into a bit of a sad, hit-and-miss affair.

My only quibble is that the book begins to wane about two-thirds of the way in and never quite picks up the pace again. Chatwin fills much of the last few chapters with jottings from old notebooks in an attempt to explore his idea that travelling is a natural instinct in humankind that has been tamed by the trappings of materialistic life. I appreciated the point, but felt it had been laboured much too strongly.

Despite this, The Songlines is a highly readable and interesting travel tale, well worth reading, especially if you are interested in nomadic lifestyles, aboriginal culture and the Australian outback.

What is it about the English? Not the British overall, not the Scots, not the Irish or Welsh, but the English. Why do they seem so unsure of who they are? As Jeremy Paxman remarks in his preface to The English, being English "used to be so easy". Now, with the Empire gone, with Wales and Scotland moving into more independent postures, with the troubling spectre of a united Europe(and despite the raucous hype of "Cool Britannia"), the English seem to have entered a collective crisis of national identity.

Jeremy Paxman has set himself the task of finding just what exactly is going on. Why, he wonders, "do the English seem to enjoy feeling so persecuted? What is behind the English obsession with games? How did they acquire their odd attitudes to sex and food? Where did they get their extraordinary capacity for hypocrisy?" He ranges widely in pursuit of answers, sifting through literature, cinema and history. It is an intriguing investigation, encompassing many aspects of national life and character (such as it is), including the obligatory visit to that baffling phenomenon, the funeral of Princess Diana. Yet Paxman finds something fresh and interesting to say about even that now rather threadbare topic. In the end, he seems to find further questions to ask instead of answers. But why not? To him it is a sign that the English are acquiring a new sense of self. And some indication of this might lie in the obvious response to his remark that the English, being top of the British Imperial tree, had nicknames for the fellow nationalities--Jock, Taffy, Paddy and Mick--but there was no corresponding name for an Englishman. Of course, there is now, and it comes from one of the bits of empire to which so many undesirables were exported: Whinging Pom. --Robin Davidson

The World's Most Dangerous Thought Experiment, 24 Dec 2008
(1) Diamond bravely puts his reputation on the block here. He tries to determine just why there has always been those well-known haves and have nots, both across history and still to this day.

(2) Diamond uses many disciplines in his analysis - anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, biology/microbiology, history, epidemiology, migrational studies, immunology, history of medicine, the history of technology etc.

(3) He argues that the scientific, technological, engineering, medical, architectural, mathematical and other such achievements and innovations of certain races of humankind (white skinned and brown skinned) are no more than a matter of geographical luck and being in the right place at the right time.

(4) There is no more to it than that. It's not a matter of sheer mental talents, astonishing scientific and mathematical creative gifts, amazing minds, boundless brilliance, a lack of indolence. It's certainly not due to a congenitally superior intellect. It's nothing to do with the ability to think deeply, with sheer power, intricacy, subtlety and finesse and the drive to work and think hard.

(5) What this often unintentionally funny book basically suggests to me is that its readers run a very dangerous thought experiment. Would you like to try my thought experiment here and now? Let's go.

(6) First, run back the clock of time. Run it back to the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens. Now take the 4 major racial types: Australoids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids. Remove the second group from the face of the Earth, forever.

(7) Now run history forward with what you've got. Do we have 2 space probes that have left the solar system? Cell phones? FED or SED Television? Computers? Software? The Internet? Bose-Einstein condensates? Broadcasting? Immensely complex broadcast equipment and receivers? DAB radio? Newspapers? The microchip? Recording and mixing desks? Blu-ray DVD players? Inoculations? The Airbus A380? The Large Hadron Collider? Gravitational wave experiments? Robots on Mars and a probe on a moon of Saturn? Do we have GPS satellites that take the Theory of Relativity into account? Cities? Sanitation? Highways? Bridges? Schools? The combustion engine? Machinery? Space probes that take gravitational sling-shots from planets? Ground and space telescopes? Manufacturing? Electricity? Nuclear energy? The modern battery? Trains and railways? Nanotechnology? Atomic clocks? Add to the list yourself - because there's a lot. Isn't there?

(8) Do we have the astonishing, colossal and stupendous scientific, engineering, mathematical, architectural, medical, surgical, medical scientific and technological achievements made upon the Earth to date?

(9) Would we even end up with the book or the wheel by 2010?

(10) Do we have a rich history, with a Euler, an Einstein, an Ed Witten, a Carl Friedrich Gauss, a Marie Curie, Bohr, Born, James Clerk-Maxwell, Watson & Crick & Wilkins & Rosalind Franklin, Darwin, Davy, Lise Meitner, Euclid, Archimedes, Faraday, Kepler, Newton, Robert Boyle? Poincare, Charles Lyell, Mendel, Oppenheimer, Planck, Boltzmann, Pauli, Heisenberg, Shrodinger, Rutherford, Dirac, Feynman, Hawking, Pauling, Lavosier, Mendeleev, Dalton, David Hilbert, Galois, Riemann, Ramanujan, Wheeler, Galileo Galilei, da Vinci, Helmholtz, William Thomson, Clausius, Willard Gibbs, Walther Nernst, Turing, Godel, Wittgenstein, Berners-Lee, Hubble, Kaluza-Klein, Pasteur, Gell-Mann, Veneziano, Michio Kaku, Sadi Carnot, Robert Mayer, Eddington, Fermi, Chandrasekhar, Lisa Randall? Google great architects, engineers, famous geologists, pioneering surgeons and other such people too ... add to the list.

(11) Would we really have all this astonishing mental achievement and all these great outcomes? To me the answer is clearly NO. We would not be even close.

(12) Jared Diamond argues differently. Read his book. Then sit down and run, in your own head, the world's most dangerous thought experiment ...

Interesting read, 21 Nov 2008
This book seemed to be on dsplay in bookshops at around the same time as "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" by David Landes. Whereas David Landes is an economic historian, Jared Diamond is an anthropologist and geographer.

Having read both books, it struck me that there were often two competing explanations for the same phenemona. I think each author should moderate the others views. I think that both authors have a tendency to push their own pet theories a little further than they really ought to go and perhaps it would be better to take the best insights from both approaches and combine them into a bigger explanation than arguing about 'what came first - the chicken or the egg?'.

Diamond combines grand overarching theories with detailed discussions of such topics as the way in which various plants and animals were first domesticated.

Altogether a compelling read but one has to take it with a pinch of salt.



Good history, but not the complete story?, 12 Nov 2008
At the simple level, this book is a tour de force of the history and geography of mankind, and of how the latter has helped to shape the former. It is a book that everybody should read, if only to counterbalance the eurocentric versions of world history that dominate the bookshelves. Diamond explains how accidents of plant and animal distribution gave some peoples the advantages in agriculture and hence population density that they needed to conquer others, and most interestingly, led them to develop world-conquering diseases.

However, I was a little wary when the author of a science book sets out with a political aim, namely to prove that the present observed inequalities in wealth, goods and technology between peoples of the world are entirely explained by the environment. Put simply, Diamond tries to settle the 'nature-nurture' debate once and for all in the favour of nurture. While I think he makes a compelling case why Australasia never developed agriculture and the technologies that spring from it, the argument is much thinner in the case of Africa and the Americas. Why, for example, in continents that lacked suitable horses or oxen to provide mechanical power were there no attempts to develop water-wheels or windmills?

While many of Diamond's observations about the three major land-masses on Earth are undoubtedly correct, there is no reason why these could not coexist with other explanations, such as genetic differences between the capabilities and behavioural preferences of different peoples. And if they were to coexist, there is a likelihood that natural advantages would reinforce the rate at which genetic differences developed and diverged. In order to prove that the wealth differences are entirely the result of the environment, Diamond would also need to disprove that there are any genetic differences, something that he fails to do. I'm afraid that the only argument he proposes against genetic contributors, namely "because they are supported by racists", while it may be true, doesn't cut the mustard intellectually. No, he needs to demolish the genetic argument systematically, citing references from equally reputable peer-reviewed journals.

Sometimes the holes in his argument are in what is omitted, rather than in factual content (which is, by and large, impeccable). For example, he stated that the native people of New Guinea were likely more intelligent on average than native Europeans, because the former have much greater natural selection pressures placed upon them, both from the environment, and from the much higher murder rate. In doing so, of course, he avoids the possible effects of sexual selection for intelligence over the last 10000 years: in the West, the preference of women for wealthy men, who have the resources to support more children, must surely have influenced the population's genetic profile. Likewise, the harsh winters in Eurasia seem to have led to resource-storing behaviours in the North, and this ability to defer gratification, which has at least in part a genetic root, has contributed to Eurasian numeracy, inventiveness, capitalisation, finance, trade, and other behaviours that have led to us having all the 'cargo'.

In summary, this book is a notable achievement, and a very worthwhile read. However, while it contributes much to the debate on the varying fortunes of the peoples on different continents, it fails in its political aim, that of proving that genetic differences have played no part in the matter.

Plants, animals and farming, 28 Jun 2008
Have you ever wondered why the world has developed the way that it has? Why some cultures and peoples seem to have prospered better than, or even at the expense of, others? If so, Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond is a book I would recommend to you. It is deeply thought provoking and well written, squeezing a history of humankind's development over the past 13,000 years into around 400 pages, which, as Diamond points out, is about 150 years per page, so not a small feat.

The basic premise of the book is that all of the worlds more advanced societies, including both those still present today and those that have disappeared into history, needed a set of complementary enablers (Ultimate Factors) to be present to allow them to develop from the original state of hunter-gatherers, from which base all people originally started. The thing that surprised me about this was just how short this list of required enablers is and as a result just how unlikely/fortunate it was that many different and varied societies did develop at all.

From the Ultimate factors, Diamond draws out a series of sequential proximate factors that lead to such historical events as European settlers not managing to settle the vast majority of the African continent or New Guinea, the decimation of the original inhabitants of North America - mostly through diseases introduced from the Old World. And, many more.

In brief, a selection of these factors include:

*The geography of any given area and the plant and animal species supported; how many of the originally wild animal species would prove suitable for domestication; How many wild plants would be worth planting - rather than say, going hunting?

*If you had enough plants and animals to domesticate, would you give up being a hunter gatherer?

*If you became a farming society would you produce enough spare food to support none-food producing crafts; politicians and artisans?

*If you did support none-food producing peoples would this eventually lead to a large dense and sedentary society etc etc

One of the many things that I really liked about this book was that it is not written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, which is very refreshing. Further, although the book isn't, I believe, intended to be a scientific text on the matter, Diamond does provide extensive references for further reading should anyone wish to do so.

I read this book having (relatively) recently finished reading Pathfinders by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and found the two books to be very complementary. I would recommend this book and Pathfinders to anyone with an interest in history, politics or humanity in general.


Enlightening, 30 May 2008
Wow. Well I have always wondered in the back of my mind why the continents have spanned out as they have, and as only great scientists can Mr Diamond has got round to answering in a hugely ambitious and incredibly fact-filled fascinating book.

I can't really say anything that hasn't been said here already but most importantly for me this book has reignited a passion for human history in me and that is achievement enough.

After the TV series, a great accompaniment, 14 Sep 2008
I am a massive fan of the tribe TV series, and it only seemed logical to get the book after watching it, so after receiving it I sat down and read the whole thing through, which was no challenge due to the books fantastic writing and incisive reporting.

The best aspect I found was that the book does not re-tell the series, more so it fills in the background for each tribe, the people behind the series, and the events that were either not captured on camera or deemed not suitable for broadcast - it delves into the less glamorous side of filming, the ailments, the problems, the danger, while keeping the nostalgic story of each tribe intact

A superb read and as stated above, a great partner to the TV series

looks like axl and writes like axl, 20 Sep 2008

"It's odd," David Foster Wallace once said. "I don't really think of myself that much as a writer."
I can't be bothered wasting my time on a considered examination of this man's prose.
He went to that lobster event and all he got out of it was one long whinge about the pain of the lobster.
He is dull , colourless and uninteresting as a writer.
No colour , no life. Lots of footnotes.

Consider the Genius., 14 Dec 2007
I finished Consider The Lobster by the US writer David Foster Wallace a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, it's now back at the library, so I can't refer to it when writing this, but I wanted to sing the praises of DFW a little. OK, a lot.

DFW first came to my attention when his epic novel Infinite Jest was published in 1996. I was blown away by the irreverence and wit of this author; the way he wore his attitude on his sleeve like a young Martin Amis. To my shame, a demanding job meant I put the book aside because I couldn't give it the attention it deserved, but I'm going to tackle it again sometime when my arm muscles are strong.(The paperback edition runs to 1080 pages of teeny tiny type.)

Subsequently, I forgot about him for a few years. Then, a couple of years ago,I borrowed Brief Interviews With Hideous Men from the library. This is one of DFW's collections of short stories, and I highly recommend it. He brings to life several ghastly characters who will make you laugh and cringe simultaneously.

One attribute of DFW's that I find unique to him is that he makes an art form of being long winded. He is a master of the footnote, and often, there's a footnote on every page in his work, with the footnote being as long as the page. Yet he is never tedious to read - on the contrary, he is refreshingly easy to consume, partly due to his dazzling ability to write and partly because there's something endearing about the way he has to explain every little point. The latter attribute means that he leads off on tangents the whole time, and the tangents have tangents too. (I'm not joking - sometimes the footnotes have footnotes). But he is definitely worth discovering. Brief Interviews is a collection that most serious readers will gobble up; the mix of dry humour and talanted eloquence being almost intoxicating.

Consider The Lobster is a collection of essays from the late '90s and early noughties. The opening one is a foray into the world of pornography: DFW attends a mega porn award show in order to write about it. The weird, twisted world of porn is accurately nailed and the reader comes away with conflicting feelings including disgust, contempt, pity and sadness.

My favourite essay was the one where DFW joins the press entourage following the Republican candidate John McCain in the last US elections. DFW writes as an impartial observer, freely admitting he voted Democrat in the election. The essay brings the world of US politics sharply into focus. The most revealing parts are those outlining the dirty tricks played by the George Dubya Bush team. Because DFW is actually on the campaign trail, following the Straight Talk Express (McCain's tour bus), there is a sense of comtemporaneous following of the trail. I found it fascinating.

The essay that gives the collection its title, Consider The Lobster,which is a piece about a major annual lobster festival in Maine, is also full of food (ouch) for thought. DFW is not a journalist who covers only the superficial aspect of a subject - he pokes around in the little niches and dark corners where other writers fear to venture. His matter-of-fact and intelligent musing on the myths we are fed about lobsters' ability to feel pain will certainly make me think before eating lobster again. The fact that he is so scrupulously researched, so damned clever, means that you want to keep reading, unlike many simplistic pro-animal rights individuals who shove partisan views down one's throat in such a biased not to mention uninformed and inaccurate way that it makes you want to avoid the issue totally. The great thing about reading DFW is that it's like listening to an incredibly bright friend give their opinion on issues in an entertaining way.

The only reason I gave this collection four stars rather than five was because of the slightly esoteric subjects covered and the fact that I tend to prefer fiction to non fiction. But DFW is probably the young (under 50) writer I would most like to be stuck in a pub with.

****0

Not Perfect, but Awfully Good, 04 Nov 2006
I've never read Wallace, mostly because his best known work ("Infinite Jest") is so long. But I tend to like writers that digress and use footnotes for asides, so I thought maybe this collection of ten essays would give me enough of a taste to know if I should check out his other stuff. Ranging in length from 7 to 80 pages, the essays all appeared previously (albeit often truncated) in various magazines such as Harper's, The Atlantic, Gourmet, Rolling Stone, Premier, etc. They can be roughly categorized into three categories: brief review, personal piece, and long in-depth topical examination.

The brief reviews generally tend to take an item and use it as a staging area for discussing something more interesting than the given subject. For example, in "Certainly the End of Something or Other", Wallace uses his review of John Updike's novel Toward the End of Time to highlight the general narcissism and shallowness of writers such as Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. His 20-page review of Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoevsky is largely dedicated to making a larger point about literary criticism, and his 25-page review of tennis player Tracy Austin's autobiography is similarly dedicated to identifying the fundamental problem of sports memoirs. I have to admit that the essential point of the shortest piece, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness", eluded me.

The two more personal pieces are strikingly different, but in each one gets a vivid impression of Wallace working through his own feelings. In, "The View From Mrs. Thompson's", he uses 13 pages to recount his own September 11 experience in Bloomington, Indiana. As one reads of the mysterious sprouting of flags, Wallace's hunt for a flag of his own, and his spending the day watching the footage with old ladies who've never been to New York, his mounting alienation from his neighbors is fascinating. The titular story is ostensibly a standard travel piece on a Maine lobster festival, but rapidly evolves into a thoughtful meditation (with scientific research) on the ethics of preparing and eating lobster.

The four in-depth essays are the real stars of the book, in each Wallace gets deep into his material and wallows in it with intellectual vigor and above all, wit. In the 50-page "Big Red Son", he covers the porn Oscars and emerges with scenes and quotes so surreal they must be true. Over the course of the 50-page "Authority and American Usage", he takes a topic close to his heart as a writing instructor and provides a layman's overview of the Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist "usage wars". The underbelly of political campaigning is exposed in the 80-page "Up Simba", detailing his week on the John McCain's 2000 campaign trail -- the ultimate lesson is that if you want the most astute and nuanced political analysis, turn to the camera and sound techs, not the journos. Finally, the 70-page "Host" takes us into the world of talk radio, via a profile of an LA radio personality. All of these long pieces are wonderful (albeit in very different ways), as they allow Wallace's intellect the space to range free and elaborate.

Ultimately, it's not hard to see why Wallace is a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award-winner. His combination of smarts, thoughtfulness, self-awareness, wit, and ability to write killer prose simply can't be ignored. One does have to raise an eyebrow at his overuse of footnotes, however. While I'm a big fan of footnotes (yes, even in fiction), I find Wallace's use of footnotes within footnotes rather tiresome (not to mention tough on the eyes). In many instances, it seems like the material could have been handled much more elegantly within the text, or within a parenthetical. This is especially true of "Host", which is very nearly ruined by the attempt to use boxed text and arrows to replace footnotes. There's no textual reason for the method, and the experiment doesn't work at all, only serving to highlight the unnecessary divisions of information and reducing their navigability.

Although a few of the pieces failed to totally captivate me, and the overfootnoting grated (especially in it's final iteration), this is still a highly entertaining and enlightening book. Chuck Klosterman's essays are like potato chips -- yummy, hard to stop at just one, and not super filling. Wallace's are generally a full nutritious meal at your favorite restaurant.

Rewires your synapses, 14 Feb 2006
I love Wallace's novels and short stories, but in my opinion his intellect sometimes impedes his storytelling. I like my books smart, but Wallace's footnotes and in-jokes and surely-you-all-know-this-as-well-as-I-do type en passant references can be a bit over the cerebral top. But what can be annoying in fiction, works far better in the essay format. His quirky and brainy and alienated reporter persona seems to me a perfect position from which to comment on the current state of affairs in such diverse spheres as porn, literature, US language, electoral campaigns, lobster festivals and conservative talk radio. His hyper-reflexive analyses are wonderfully mind-bending, his command of language supreme, and his uneasy embeddedness in real-world sit