The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
You know, this wAs quite good. Like a fun text book. Listening to it on audio book probably made a difference. Diamond puts so much effort into dispelling commonly held assumptions about societies both traditional and modern that it is impossible to come away unconvinced. The variety of ways cultures across the planet eat, communicate, raise children and worship are just endlessly fascinating. He does a stellar job at presenting pros and cons of each society and goes through the effort of not fetishizing non-modernized cultures. Powerful, insightful, entertaining, well-informed and utterly devoid of vapid simplifications. 4.5 stars- still too biased to his perspective e. This is NOT my favorite Jared Diamond book. Oh, there's good stuff in it, all right. But it doesn't "read well". It seemed a bit too "textbooky", but perhaps that's just me. I actually enjoyed Part Five (of five), Religion, Language and Health the most, although there were good earlier chapters, for example, the one about child autonomy.But my biggest beef was his, or his publishers' decision to put the notes online instead of in the printed book! To make matters worse, the web page appears to have been taken down!
What do You think about The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? (2012)?
Gets a bit protracted and boring...a bit much for my short attention span.
—islam90
Wow that was wooly and full of waffle. Disappointing for the most part.
—damon
Not as compelling as Guns, Germs, and Steel, but still a good read.
—teen
I was expecting it to be a lot better...so dissapointed
—pladee
