Guns, Germs and Steel

I will be the first to say that I am not a huge non-fiction person. However, my eyes were opened to the genre over the summer when I read a phenomenal, fast-paced non-fiction novel for my AP Biology class, [b:The Demon in the Freezer 198505 The Demon in the Freezer Richard Preston https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1172613042s/198505.jpg 192020]. This was no Demon in the Freezer.For starters, barely 30 pages into the book, the first red flag popped up. Jared Diamond is not a historian. Nor is he an anthropologist. Rather, he is an evolutionary biologist. So, okay. There's a slight connection. But still, I felt that it called into question his expertise on the topic. I found Diamond's writing to be terribly dry. Granted, history is, to me, not exactly the world's most exciting topic, but surely it could have been less bland. Maybe a joke or two? A pun? Something to keep the reader engaged? I didn't care much about the vast majority of the topics. Only a few really interested me, which I acknowledged was not the book's fault. But it was mighty difficult to trudge through each boring chapter. My only salvation was that each chapter was broken up into little mini passages, so I could give myself rewards for finishing a single passage. You think I'm kidding? Ask Alex.Another thing that saved this book from a DNF? The pictures. They were frequent enough for me to look forward to them and get excited whenever one popped up. It meant I didn't have to read a page! But the one strange thing about the pictures was that there were two twenty-page (each!) sections of the book that were simply photographic portraits of different people. There was not even a single mention of these photographs until the epilogue of the book, so I was like “what is going on” whenever one of these sections popped up literally in the middle of a sentence.The final gripe I have with the book was one section of a chapter in which Diamond did not write anything. Well, he quoted. He quoted for an entire chapter. Basically, it went down like this:“so, the invasion of the Incas by the Spanish was pretty bad but I don't really feel like explaining it to you, so here's a couple primary sources”Thanks??? The only reason this book deserves two stars is that at least some of the content is interesting. And, I must admit that I did learn something at the end, which is the point of a non-fiction novel.Overall, this just wasn't the book for me. It was terribly dense, bland, and boring, and had me watching the page count like a hawk, just waiting for page 431 to pop up.