I wanted to enjoy Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, and it started off well. He details a conversation he had with a New Guinean who asked a simple question, "Why was it the whites that invaded New Guinea and not the other way around?" This book is Diamond's answer to the question. No, it's not that white people are smarter, faster, stronger and better than everyone else. In a nutshell, it's because of geography, climatology and agronomy.