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Jared Diamond
History & Commentary
American scientist, historian, and author known for popular nonfiction on societal change, including the 2019 book Upheaval.
Biography
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist, historian, and author. Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, he has written hundreds of scientific and popular articles and books and has published across anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. His best-known book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), received multiple awards including the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. He received a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1985 and the National Medal of Science in 1999. He was a professor of geography at UCLA until his retirement in 2024.
Despite widespread popularity, Diamond’s work has long attracted harsh criticism from working researchers in the fields he addresses. Historians, anthropologists, and geographers such as Andrew Sluyter have published extensive analyses pointing to factual and logical errors, and institutions including the American Anthropological Association and the journal Antipode have published collections of critical responses. In 2005 he was ranked ninth on a Prospect and Foreign Policy poll of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals.
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Books by Jared Diamond
Upheaval
Upheaval (2019) analyzes devastating national crises and the multiple reasons behind them, examining past crises in countries such as Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States. Diamond compares how individuals cope with personal trauma to how nations respond, concluding that individuals often learn from crisis while countries seldom do, and arguing that crises in the United States are getting worse.