Highly Recommended: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Last week I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond's 1997 Pulitzer-Prize winning book on why certain societies acquired certain advantages while their contemporaries did not. It is honestly one of the five best non-fiction books I have ever read. Diamond offers the following summary of the book in the Afterward of the 2003 edition:

My main conclusion was that societies developed differently on different continents because of differences in continental environments, not in human biology. Advanced technology, centralized political organization, and other features of complex societies could emerge only in dense sedentary populations capable of accumulating food surpluses―populations that depended for their food on the rise of agriculture that began around 8,500 b.c. But the domesticable wild plant and animal species essential for that rise of agriculture were distributed very unevenly over the continents. The most valuable domesticable wild species were concentrated in only nine small areas of the globe, which thus became the earliest homelands of agriculture. The original inhabitants of those homelands thereby gained a head start toward developing guns, germs, and steel. The languages and genes of those homeland inhabitants, as well as their livestock, crops, technologies, and writing systems, became dominant in the ancient and modern world. (pp. 426-427)

Diamond's book is a study of the intersection of anthropology, evolutionary biology, geography, geology, sociology, and history. If you have any interest in any of these subjects, I think you'll find Guns, Germs, and Steel a fascinating read.