Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (unabridged audiobook read by Doug Ordunio; 16 hrs 21 min on 13 discs): This book aims to answer the question of why Eurasia became such a world power and dominated other nations. The historical (and racist) answer was that there was some inherent difference in the people of those lands, but this book goes into explicit detail on why this is clearly not the case. Rather, it boils down to a large number of factors dealing with crop and livestock domestication, climate, and geographic accessibility. There’s a lot of truly englightening information gathered here, but the text is quite dense, and quite difficult to digest quickly. It’s not a casual beach read, but certainly well worth picking up.
A note on the audio: This is a difficult book to earread, as the narrator is very monotone and yet also puts emphasis on unexpected words. Having to decipher the words through the jarring inflection made it much harder to digest the already dense information. If you want to read this one, stick with the paper version.
Also posted on BookCrossing.