Non-Fiction Book Club to Discuss: The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond - Thursday, November 6th at 6:30PM

The Pollard Library Non-Fiction book club, having survived an intense conversation over it’s last chosen title The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, has set its sights on it’s next nonficiton mongraphical wonder: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond. We will be discussing this book on November 6th at 6:30pm. Copies are available for patrons to borrow first come first serve at the first floor information desk.

About the Book (from the dust jacket):

The Pulitzer Prize winning author of the bestsellers Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel returns to our past in search of a better future.
Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and cell phones to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six mission years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us fro our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies that still exist or were recently in existence. Societies such as that of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday, in evolutionary tie, when everything changed. The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of human life as it had been for tens of thousands of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our resent mean for our own lives today.

About the Author

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at UCLA. Among his many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan’s Cosmos Prize, A MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by Rockefeller University. His previous books include Why Is Sex Fun?; The Third Chimpanzee; Collapse; and Guns, Germs, and Steel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.