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To a certain extent, I’ve always wondered why Guns, Germs, and Steel caused such a huge splash. The main premise boils down to ‘differences in geography cause differences in societies and their history’, which belongs to the club of the blindingly obvious.

Of course, the real point of the book is to pin down just which differences are the important ones. This is a cause for much arguement, but Diamond has successfully pulled out the most important ones as applied to history as a whole. This largely turns into a study of what plants and animals were successfully domesticated in early prehistory, and how that turned certain areas into the origin of settled agriculture. That is still fairly basic stuff, but benefits greatly from studying the results from all around the world all at once, and examining just what it takes for something to be capable of being domesticated. (I know there’s been some interesting work done on that since this book came out, but I haven’t seen it escape scholarly journals in more detail than a National Geographic article.)

From there, Diamond points out how plants and animals are generally adapted to a certain climate, and that while it is fairly easy to find different climates going east and west (due to cold mountains, dry deserts, wet coasts, and other accidents of geology), large differences of climate are guaranteed when traveling any real distance north and south. Looking at a map and noting that the Americas and Africa are divided into north-south zones, while Eurasia is oriented east-west, then provides material to show why certain areas needed to work everything out independently, while others were able to borrow everything they needed from elsewhere (before the Age of Exploration, the two situations were probably somewhat even by landmass; the book naturally spends much more time looking at the former).

The main thing that makes this book new is actually the ‘germs’ part of the book. It is only fairly recently that we’ve really become aware of where most of the deadly diseases we have to deal with come from—other animals. So societies that have and live closely with lots of domesticatible animals get to suffer from deadly epidemics when an occasional virus adapts to a new host (us), and then develop some level of immunity to it. When people who don’t have much/anything in the way of domesticated animals run into people who do, they die off as multiple epidemics run through the countryside. This is the other ‘new’ part—the fact that a lot of Native American population was wiped out by disease is well known, but it’s been hard to realize the scale of the disaster. The “Mound Builders” were a disappeared pre-Columbian civilization of the Mississippi valley, and only recently has it been realized it was actually wiped out by European diseases before any Europeans got there to see it.

The ‘guns’ and ‘steel’ parts of the book are essentially non-existent. They just serve as part of the proximate cause of how Europeans came to dominate the world before turning to look for the ultimate causes back in prehistory. This is where his biases as a biologist who’s picked up a fair amount of practical cultural anthropology show. While he does discuss technology, and the fact that the wider the range of where you can get ideas from, the more ideas you will be able to encounter, he doesn’t spend any time looking at the basics of physical technology. A basic study of easily available copper, tin, iron, and clay deposits, compared with the areas that were able to develop settled agriculture could explain much that remains mysterious to him.

It’s decidedly a layman’s book, and has the advantage of being aware of more current research than any pre-college textbook. The fairly breezy, non-technical writing is set off by a good number of informative charts and maps and allow Diamond to make his points without miring himself in the minutia that would lose the non-dedicated reader. Just being able to tackle most of pre-history in a single reasonably-sized volume is an impressive feat of summarization, and the most impressive thing about the book.

The Basques is by an author who has impressed me in the past, and was also a chance to look at The Peoples of Europe series. The book (and presumably others in the series) is a little under 300 pages in an oversized paperback format, with good sized type and a good number of photographs and maps. As such, it’s not a very long or detailed book, but it’s obviously written as a friendly introductory text. The maps were not always the best (simple line maps that didn’t always have enough context), but were frequent and addressed in the text.

The book gets off to a rough start,mostly, I think, as Collins overthinks sentences to avoid nationalistic pitfalls. It gets better, but never settles down into really good prose. The earliest section deals with language and pre-history in the Pyrenees, and largely states that there is just very little that can be known. Some of that is from the fact that there hasn’t been a lot of good archaeology in the region, but mostly, what there is shows that there’s just no way to tell ‘who’ lived there at the time. Are the Basques survivors of a pre-Indo-European culture that stretched across Western Europe? Did they migrate to their current home in the face of a Indo-European invasion? Something else entirely? There’s no appreciable difference in material culture, so the only way to even define ‘Basque’ in these questions is by language, and there’s no way to tell who was speaking what before the Romans start writing about the region.

And the Romans didn’t say a lot. There are a couple units in the records that came from the region. There’s no signs that the ‘Vascones’ caused any real trouble. That starts in post-Roman period, when the Basques are effectively on the frontier between the Frankish and Visigothic kingdoms. The big surprise (for me) shows up here: Gascony (the part of France south and west of the Garrone) derives from ‘Vasconia’. It would seem that for a short time the Basques controlled much of this region, and lent it their name.

The bulk of the book is about the Middle Ages, when the Basques effectively controlled a decent chunk of land, but never gained any sort of ‘national identity’. Although Basques effectively dominated Navarre, it never presented itself as a ‘Basque kingdom’, and there were no efforts to ‘unify’ with other Basque-speakers in Gascony and Castile.

The book wraps up fairly quickly with post-Medieval history, including an analysis of the emergence of Basque nationalism in the Nineteenth Century, and how that led into their involvement in Spanish politics.

So the book is pretty much what you’d expect: A short history of one of the more unique peoples of Europe, and while the writing is not stellar, it covers the subject very well, and shines a light on a few things that often don’t get enough attention. I certainly hope to get more of the series in the future.

It often seems to me like Sicily doesn’t get a lot of attention, now or in the ancient world, even though it’s a very prominent land-mass that dominates the middle of the Mediterranean. This is more an accident of our fascination with Athens (whose worries were often more eastern than Mediterranean) and Rome (who made the Mediterranean a peaceful backwater for centuries), than a lack of importance. Both Athens and Rome actually spent a great deal of time and military effort to get control of Sicily, though their efforts tend to get lost in the tale of fighting closer to home.

But of course, Sicily had a population of its own, and the Greek colonies there tended to be quite wealthy. Of these, Syracuse was the most prominent and powerful, and so it is there that Jeff Champion focuses on, in what naturally extends to be something of a history of the island. While the title of this book indicates that it’s about the period from Gelon to Dionysius (Vol 1: 480-367 BC), he does give a good background of Greek settlement of the island, beginning in the 8th Century BC. This introduces the troubles with the native population of Sicily (which I would like to know more about) as well as the general character of Greek government.

From there, Champion spends a chapter on the earlier tyrants of Sicilian cities other than Syracuse, before launching into Gelon’s rule of Syracuse. After Gelon’s short (and popular) reign, Syracuse returns to democracy for a few years before coming under control of Dionysius, one of the more infamous tyrants of the Classical period. Much time is spent with the Athenian siege of Syracuse, and the back-and-forth of Syracuse’s efforts to dominate its neighbors, and its struggles with Carthage.

This is distinctly a ‘popular’ history book, aimed at laying the course of events out in a clear fashion by integrating the main ancient sources. As such, there’s no real thesis here, or ‘point’ being made. But, it does a great job at untangling a history that is often only presented with Sicily as a side show, when it was center of its own tumultuous events.