The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

"Challenging and smart...By focusing his infectious intellect and incredible experience on nine broad areas -- peace and war, young and old, danger and response, religion, language and health -- and sifting through thousands of years of customs across 39 traditional societies, Diamond shows us many features of the past that we would be wise to adopt." --Minneapolis Star Tribune "The World Until Yesterday [is] a fascinating and valuable look at what the rest of us have to learn from - and perhaps offer to - our more traditional kin." --Christian Science Monitor "Ambitious and erudite, drawing on Diamond's seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, physiology, nutrition and evolutionary biology. Diamond is a Renaissance man, a serious scholar and an audacious generalist, with a gift for synthesizing data and theories." --The Chicago Tribune "The World Until Yesterday is another eye-opening and completely enchanting book by one of our major intellectual forces, as a writer, a thinker, a scientist, a human being. It's a rare treasure, both as an illuminating personal memoir and an engrossing look into the heart of traditional societies and the timely lessons they can offer us. Its unique spell is irresistible." --Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wife "As always, Diamond manages to combine a daring breadth of scope, rigorous technical detail and personal anecdotes that are often quite moving." --The Cleveland Plain Dealer "Diamond's investigation of a selection of traditional societies, and within them a selection of how they contend with various issues[...]is leisurely but not complacent, informed but not claiming omniscience[...]A symphonic yet unromantic portrait of traditional societies and the often stirring lessons they offer."--Kirkus, Starred Review "This is the most personal of Diamond's books, a natural follow-up to his brilliant Guns, Germ