A review by amydomdom
Natural Experiments of History by Jared Diamond

3.0

The concept of this book was very interesting, but some of the articles simply bored me. This is perhaps inevitable when you have several articles covering such a range of topics. The articles I found enlightening (the slave trade, Haiti/DR, Polynesia, etc) covered topics in which I already have some background. Others (land tenure institutions in India and the Napoleonic invasion of Germany), I found boring. It's not so much that these topics are inherently boring to me, but when surrounded and defined by heavy statistics, it was more than I wanted. Individual articles can provide an excellent case for a more quantitative approach to history, but as a whole I think the book is hard to get into without knowing a fair amount about each topic.