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Answers to Yali Q:Yali:"Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" A:Diamond:"The striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments." That is a politically correct answer, yet if you read all of the evidence and arguments between the prologue and the epilogue where the question and answer are posed you'll be convinced by Professor Diamond's thesis. This 1997 book won several awards, most notably the Pulitzer in 1998. I was given this book by a grad student acquaintance in the Boston area, read it a half a dozen years ago. At the time, I was also studying the book of Daniel reading about how the world's first empires came to be so by conquest, in Daniel's case, conquering the tribes of Israel and deporting some of the vanquished to Babylon. This secular book added another dimension to my understanding of world history's dynamics in addition to a spiritual/prophetic one. I loved this book because it helped explain a lot of things, made me think. I've always loved anthropology and this book builds on one of its tenets that societies' key to becoming complex ones was the development of agriculture. With a permanent food supply, population numbers increased, societies increasingly diversified their occupations one of which was waging war. In societies like Papua New Guinea, a small island near Australia, where Yali was a tribal chieftain, most of the inhabitants subsisted as hunter-gatherers not advancing to the next stage of developing agriculture. So knowing that already, I was given a grander view of the advancement of societies by reading this book. Although it's been years since I've read it, I still have the book, and learned many new things from Diamond's creative thinking. As to where he got all of his intellectual cargo, he was born in Boston, probably the most book-buying state of the Union, to a physician father, linguistics teacher mother, and went to school at Harvard and Cambridge. He now teaches Geography in addition to Physiology in California at UCLA.