Re: [ossig] WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS?

[Christopher DeMarco <cdemarco@fastmail.fm>]

Uwe Dippel <udippel@uniten.edu.my> writes:

> Did you by chance read that book (I didn't) with the title like 'Why the
> west has always won' or '...always wins' ? It was reviewed a few weeks
> ago in - I think - The Star.

Not sure  if this is  it (  don't read the  Star and neither  Google nor
Amazon found anything ), but  Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" is
an  excellent  treatment  of  the environmental  advantages  that  early
Fertile Crescent and then European societies had over their competitors.
It's   a  fascinating   investigation,  purely   academic   and  neutral
(i.e. doesn't equate success with conquest nor does it attribute success
to social factors)  but the author does some fine  writing about how the
lack of local  predators to thin the buffalo herds  in North America put
the  American Indians  at a  great long-term  disadvantage and  what the
geographical  fragmentation  of  Europe   meant  for  the  prospects  of
persistent  hegemony in Europe.   Much better  writing than  *I'm* doing
trying to  describe it ;) Anyway,  is this the book  you're thinking of?
Great anthropology/biology/history stuff.  

-- 
% You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
  Christopher DeMarco
  cdemarco@fastmail.fm
  +6013 389 5658

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