"Monumental and monumentally good" (William Leith, 4 stars Scotsman)

"A book of big questions, and big answers" (Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens)

"A book of remarkable scope... One of the most important and readable works on the human past" (Nature)

"Fascinating, coherent, compassionate and completely accessible" (Sunday Telegraph)

"A prodigious, convincing work, conceived on a grand scale" (Observer)

PATTERNED PLANET: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKS

Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel remains a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science.