" This book seeks to answer a pretty interesting question: why did Eurasians develop civilizations capable of conquering the civilizations in the Americas, Africa, and Australia, and not the other way around? Were the people in Eurasia superior in some way, or were other factors at work? Diamond's answers, at least early in the book, really drew me in. But then he seemed to basically repeat the same conclusions in different ways for 200 more pages. This book is over 400 pages long and I feel like it could have been written in about half that length. It's still interesting overall, and his conclusions make sense, but it is a bit of a chore to read the whole thing. I'd recommend this for pretty serious readers of history, anthropology, and sociology, but not for casual "buffs" of those fields. "
— Russ, 2/14/2014