News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020? by madhadron on Monday December 16, 2019 @10:56AM (#21803968)
I've gotten to the point where I just suggest people skip Guns, Germs, and Steel entirely. Diamond is a really excellent writer, but he cherry picks his material to support a thesis and ignores all the prior art that shows that people already tried his thesis a century ago and discarded it.

Jump to 'The Power Broker' instead. Now that's an interesting read.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020? by qmmmur on Monday December 16, 2019 @11:24AM (#21804171)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020? by habnds on Monday December 16, 2019 @11:05AM (#21804042)
Nice, thanks. Do you have a go to piece of work that lays out where Diamond goes wrong? I've only ever heard it in off hand comments from people in human geography.

I've read a couple of the LBJ books which are really amazing and plan on getting to power broker eventually.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020? by wnorris on Monday December 16, 2019 @12:23PM (#21804822)
Agree on this one. Why Nations Fail is a fabulous book. I recommend reading Guns, Germs, and Steel first if you are going to read both. Highly recommend both.
[ Parent | on HN ]