At 88, Jared Diamond has metal spikes installed in front of his house. He put them there, he told Fortune, to protect against angry anthropologists.
“Half of anthropologists have been very helpful to me,” Diamond cheerily said in a Zoom interview from his office in Los Angeles, “and half resent the fact that I—a gallbladder physiologist who happened to have learned a lot about languages and genetics—am trespassing on their specialty.” He called them a “contentious lot,” adding, “they’ve been really nasty.”
It’s a well-earned position for Diamond, the contrarian who won a Pulitzer for his smash 1997 nonfiction hit, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Trained as a physiologist at Cambridge, he built a second career studying birds in New Guinea and a third in history and geography. Now Diamond has published what he calls his final book: Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, out this fall from Mariner Books. The argument at its center is one he has been circling since childhood—shaped, he said, by growing up in Hitler’s world. He writes in the book’s prologue about his family of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and a wife who lost many Polish relatives to the Holocaust. Do individual leaders actually change the course of events, or are they, as Tolstoy put it, history’s slaves?
