Review 555: The World Until Yesterday

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond
My rating: 4.25 of 5 stars

Somehow I have admired Jared Diamond’s writings without ever having read one of his books. Or maybe I just thought I admired it. I did see a documentary that was based on his book Guns, Germs, and Steel and I have a copy of the book a friend gave me, but have yet to read it. I bought this book, in audio form, over ten years ago. So it is nice to have finally read some of his work.

I did enjoy the book for the most part. It is on the longer side which is why I have avoided it for so many years, but I should not have feared its length as it went quickly. His writing style is very readable. And with this book the concepts are simple, maybe too simple?

Much of the book looks at traditional societies and how they conduct their lives and compare to our modern, western lives. These traditional societies are living mostly as they have been for thousands of years, how our human bodies have evolved. Today in the modern world suddenly we have a different way of life, as far as evolution goes, very sudden.

Diamond is clear that the traditional ways are not always the best ways, and there is much in the modern world that is better. However, we may have left behind a few ways of living that would serve us better if we took that practice back up. One example is by speaking more languages and raising children in multilingual households. It is common for immigrant families to have the children speak only the dominant language and not to learn the family language, but there are many reasons why being exposed to more than one language since birth is good.

The last part of the book goes into a lot of detail about food, eating and the diseases that come from the sedentary modern lifestyles. It feels like this over use of salt and sugar is very common knowledge, yet Diamond uses very compelling examples of how the modern diet effects human bodies. When a traditional society, such as Papua New Guinea, suddenly becomes integrated into a more modern society the rise of diseases previously unknown in their society start to show at alarming rates. There is a shift from communicable diseases in the traditional world, to non-communicable, such as diabetes and heart diseases. I found it interesting what he says about rates of cancer are virtually unknown in traditional societies. Yet, the average life span is also at least 20 years less, and cancer is more prevalent the older you become.

There are some very incredible stories in here too. The chapter on dangers was quite fascinating, which Diamond relating several stories about how he was unaware of the danger he was in until much later. Also, a harrowing story of an overturned boat and his hope to make it out alive.