Book Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is an American scientist, historian and author whose sweeping books explore why human societies rise, thrive and fall. Trained in biochemistry and physiology, he joined the UCLA medical faculty as a physiology professor in 1968 and later taught geography at UCLA, while building parallel expertise in ecology, evolutionary biology, anthropology and geography. His landmark book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Royal Society Science Books Prize. His other titles include The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Why Is Sex Fun? (1997), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), The World Until Yesterday (2012) and Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change. Diamond received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985 and the National Medal of Science in 1999, along with the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (2001), the Wolf Prize in Agriculture (2013) and the Blue Planet Prize (2019). In 2005 Prospect and Foreign Policy placed him ninth in a poll of the world's top public intellectuals. He is a thoughtful, engaging lecturer on history, geography, environmental change and how nations handle crisis, offering big-picture perspective drawn from decades of fieldwork and research.