The Live Read

Want to give it a try yourself? Here's the copy we emailed the ten semi-finalists: they were given exactly one minute to look it over before reading it live on the phone with us.

"Our guest Jared Diamond writes cosmic history with bold strokes and unfamiliar detail. Why did European and Asian peoples get to take dominion of the world — not American Indians, with all those resources under their feet, or Africans, living in the original habitat of the human species? The answers in Jared Diamond’s celebrated book “Guns, Germs and Steel” come from an intimate knowledge of plant and animal biology, of language and culture and from close observation over the years of the last hunter-gatherers in the tropical Pacific Island of New Guinea. The answers are never as simple as Jared Diamond’s book title suggests: Why did the Spanish conquistador Pizzaro with 168 men capture and destroy the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1532 when Atahaulpa commanded vast wealth and 80,000 troops? Cavalry and guns are too easy an explanation: the real question is why the Spaniards had horses and gunpowder and the Incas didn’t; and the real answers go back to innovations in food production as early as the last Ice Age 13,000 years ago, long before written language much less recorded history. How did the world get to be the way it is? Jared Diamond is next, on the Public Radio Talent Quest.

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