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Fascinating, and yet so tedious I am recommending this book; however, I found it quite the chore to get through. The premise of the book is a 400-page walk through human history to try to determine factors that led to some cultures dominating others, rather than the reverse, for example, the Europeans decimating the Native Americans rather than Native Americans traveling to Europe and dominating those people. The proximate causes are easy to see, but the ultimate causes are the subject of this book. The author looks at many factors in all parts of the world: food production (why it was developed in some places and not in others), aggregation of populations, centralization of governments, development of technology, and so forth. His basic thesis is that development in the cultures of the world was subject to the various climatic, geographical, and ecological properties of the places they lived. He expands on this thesis and provides many compelling examples. And then he beats all his points to death, using many examples over and over and over and over again. He repeats statements he made earlier, not as a review, but as though he were writing them for the first time. He condescends to us readers (for example, feeling like he has to tell us that honeybees give honey and silkworms silk). And he has made some sloppy errors (having carbon-14 decay to nitrogen-14 and carbon-12 in the same paragraph; mixing up aardwolves and aardvarks). His writing style is often clunky and stilted. Nonetheless, I fought my way through the book to the end. And despite the obstacles thrown in my path to Page 420-something, I found the experience very interesting. Because the events he talks about happened in the distant past, it's hard to know whether he's right or not, but he does make a compelling argument for these physical factors making the difference in the development of different cultures. So if you decide to read this book, skim when you get bored, but try to read it to the end.