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Another get from the town transfer station. I love it when a book on my "to-read" list turns up there.

Pretty engrossing so far, if not that original.

Into it a bit now and the author's premise comes through clearly. One might call this an anti-racist book. His main point is to answer Yali's question: Why did this race/culture prevail over that race/culture. Big Hint! It's not because of racial differences. It's because of the varied rates of economic, technological, political development in different cultures in different parts of the world. The variation being caused by the relative abundance or scarcity of natural resources and the time available in a given area for development to take place. Makes sense to me, but then, I was an Anthro major! The author is(or was) an Anthro prof at UCLA.

- The author states that Grizzlies can't be tamed, but it seems to me that that has been accomplished because they've been used in movies. Just sayin' ...

- He gets his population numbers a bit confused when talking about the "invasion" of the new world by Europeans. He first says that there were 20 million NA's in Mexico at the time of(but just prior to) Cortez' invasion, and then he says the NA population of all of the America's was 20 million. The two numbers don't compute. I wonder which is correct?

Just finished the chapter about the migrations of peoples and languages in south Asia and the Pacific and must say that the author miscalculated here in providing a much too dense, scholarly and academic detail-laden look at the issues of who went where and when. This, of course, is the part of the world most compelling to him. New Guinea is the focus of his scholarly and field work. Boring, confusing and over the top.

The onslaught of scholarly research trivia continues and will result in this book's only getting a 3* rating. If I have to do a significant amount of skimming due to boredom that'll bring the old rating down. And ... there are several instances of conflicting statistics, as in the population of Hispaniola upon the arrival of Chris Columbus. Poor proof-reading ...

Finished last night with this (IMHO)over-rated book. The basic point is pretty obvious these days isn't it? I think it's called geographic determinism in human cultural evolution. I don't personally know of any debate raging out there in academia(perhaps there is), but of course the know-nothings will continue to know nothing and there's not much can be done about it. The book had a promising beginning as it took a nice far-back perspective on things historical, human culture-wise, but then all the academic-linguistic-analysis stuff got rolled out and I got bored. The subject is worthy, but needs a better treatment. The ultimate wrap-up was fine and the author gives an extensive reading list arranged by chapter in lieu of a conventional biography.

- A gentleman's "c" = 3* rated.