Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond)

An ambitious and largely successful attempt to illuminate some of the complex historical forces that drove some human cultures, largely Eurasian, to develop so much faster than others since the end of the last ice age. The main factors he identifies are environmental; Eurasia had a larger suite of plants and animals suitable for domestication, an east-west axis that made it easier for crops and livestock to diffuse to nearby regions with similar climates, and few natural boundaries to this diffusion. As a result, farming and husbandry developed earlier and spread faster there, supporting denser human populations and therefore more innovation (and more deadly germs from the animals, to which they developed some resistance). The author supports his thesis with a great volume of data that is exhaustive, not to say exhausting.