Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond is a 494-page softcover published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.  The cover has a light crease along the outer edge.  Inside, the pages are clean and unmarked the the binding is tight. 

Book Summary

This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.  The question motivating the book is:  why did history unfold differently on different continents?  In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren't:  as you will see, the answers to the question don't involve human racial differences at all.