His 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies began with a simple question - 'Why did Pizarro conquer the Incas and not the other way around?' - and then managed to tell, over the course of only 400-odd pages, the history of why humanity has turned out the way it has.
I will always think of Jared Diamond as the man who, for the better part of the late 1990s, somehow made the phrase 'east-west axis of orientation' the most talked-about kind of orientation there was - freshman, sexual, or otherwise. Jared Diamond’s Collapse traces the fates of societies to their treatment of the environment
