Allen Lane - Penguin Books 2012. Hardback with dust jacket, 498 pages.
The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the
history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn
from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for
all of us? Most of us take for
granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and
telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its
six million years of existence, human society had none of these things.
While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem
unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those
largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies
like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only
yesterday-in evolutionary time-when everything changed and that we
moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted
to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday
provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had
been for millions of years-a past that has mostly vanished-and considers
what the differences between that past and our present mean for our
lives today.
This is Jared Diamond's most personal book to date,
as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific
islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San
people, and others. Diamond doesn't romanticize traditional
societies-after all, we are shocked by some of their practices-but he
finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child
rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have
much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The
World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.