Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. Ann Dunnigan, translator. (New American Library, New York, 1968).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jared Diamond’s interests in history and geography stem from being born in 1937 and thus growing up during World War Two, with daily changing maps pinned up by his father on his bedroom wall depicting the shifting battle lines in the European and Pacific war theaters. His first 21 years of life are summarized here of this book. Four years spent living in Europe as a graduate student (from 1958 to 1962) reinforced for Jared the importance of geography. His British, German, Yugoslav, and Finnish friends, all born like him around the year 1937, had experienced very different lives from Jared’s, and from one another’s, as accidents of the geographic locations of their birthplaces.
Jared’s graduate training prepared him for a career of research and teaching in laboratory physiology, which he pursued at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical School. But his interest in other subjects led him to launch a parallel second career in ecology and evolution of the birds of New Guinea, to which he has led 31 expeditions. Among ornithologists, Jared is known especially for his rediscovery, on a summit of the uninhabited Foja Mountains, onto which he was dropped by helicopter, of New Guinea’s long-lost golden-fronted bowerbird, previously known only from four specimens that had turned up in a Paris hat shop in 1895. New Guinea and its wonderful people have been a major influence on Jared’s life.
The birth of Jared’s twin sons in 1987 brought home to him the realization that their futures wouldn’t depend on gallbladder physiology or New Guinea birds, no matter how fascinating—but on the state of the world. Hence he began a third career of writing books about history and geography. Because of his wide interests, one reviewer wrote, “‘Jared Diamond’ is suspected of actually being the pseudonym for a committee of experts.”
Today, at age 81, Jared is still teaching geography to UCLA undergraduates, with no plans to retire. Besides spending time with his wife Marie, his sons Max and Joshua, and his friends, Jared’s other main activities are daily bird walks from his house in a Los Angeles canyon, pumping iron in a gym several days a week, an Italian conversation lesson once a week, and playing the piano in classical chamber music groups.
Also by JARED DIAMOND
The World Until Yesterday
Collapse
Why Is Sex Fun?
Guns, Germs, and Steel
The Third Chimpanzee
1 Barry Rolett and Jared Diamond. Environmental predictors of pre-European deforestation on Pacific islands. Nature 431: 443–446 (2004).
2 Jared Diamond and James Robinson, eds. Natural Experiments of History. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010).
3 Gabriel Almond, Scott Flanagan, and Robert Mundt, eds. Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development. (Little, Brown, Boston, 1973).
4 Those two powerful rival domains—Satsuma at the south tip of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu, Choshu at the southwest tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu—played a major role at many stages of recent Japanese history. Both were defeated by Tokugawa armies in 1600. In the early 1860’s both took the lead in attacking Westerners and Western ships, and hence received the brunt of Western retaliation. Both buried their rivalry in order to overthrow the last shogun in 1868, but then staged the biggest revolts against the Meiji government in the 1870’s.
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Page 48
