Finished reading this book recently. It has been sitting on my bookshelf since 2002 I think. Too bad it took me so long to get around to reading it. It was great. Very informative and interesting. It is a brief history of humankind over the last 13,000+ years. Obviously, in covering so much ground in 400 or so pages, the book is low on specifics. What it does is give a broad overview of why the several histories of different civilizations played out so differently. For example, why did Europe conquer America and not the other way around? He goes beyond the proximate causes of guns germs and steel and attempts to root out the ultimate causes that led to history playing out as it did. It is a great book and well worth the read.
