The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

It took me about a month to read this utterly fascinating and absorbing book. Jared Diamond writes in a very accessible style about what people term ‘popular science’. He’s a geographer and arguably an ethnographer and this book compares traditional societies, with a heavy emphasis on New Guinea where he spends part of every year, and modern developed societies. He compares approaches to warfare, religion, child rearing, the treatment of the aged linguistics, approaches to danger, and health. It’s the sort of material that you want to remember and of course can’t, because of its detail. He presents masses of supporting evidence and you get the feeling that this is all thoroughly researched and thought out, the work of a lifetime of careful observation and follow up reading. This is a book I’ll keep on my shelf. Much of the information in it is actually a little bit life changing, especially approaches to child rearing, eating and, more broadly, in the way you view other human beings and their cultural background.