Here is a list of books by one of my favorite authors, Jared Diamond.



Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Originally trained in physiology, Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, and he is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.


Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed



What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture of Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world, Diamond traces a pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals or environment gives us.


link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IESYMFtLIis


Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies



In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991/2004)



A wide-ranging book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which applies insights from biology, anthropology, and linguistics to questions such as why one species of big mammal (humans) came to dominate its closest relatives, such as chimpanzees, and why one group of humans (Eurasians) came to dominate others (Indigenous peoples of the Americas).
It also examines how asymmetry in male and female mating behaviour is resolved through differing social structures across cultures, and how first contact between unequal civilizations almost always results in genocide. The book ends by noting that technological progress may cause environmental degradation on a scale leading to extinction.
The original title (1991) was The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee: How Our Animal Heritage Affects the Way We Live (ISBN 978-0-09-174268-3), the current title was adopted with the third edition in 2006. In between, the second edition of 2004 was titled The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee: Evolution and Human Life.


Why Is Sex Fun? - The Evolution of Human Sexuality



Why Is Sex Fun? - The Evolution of Human Sexuality is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond dealing with the evolutionary development of human sexuality. Diamond addresses some peculiar aspects of human sexuality. These include why women's ovulation is not overtly advertised; why humans have sex in private rather than in public, as is the case in all other mammals; and why the ovaries are u-shaped. The book came five years after Diamond's previous work The Third Chimpanzee and was published in the same year as the well known title Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is dedicated to his wife Marie.