Jared Diamond, academic and author

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jared Diamond is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, although his interests and expertise range far wider, from physiology to ornithology, history to ecology and from anthropology to evolutionary biology. His 1997 book, Guns, Germs and Steel, asked why Eurasian civilizations prospered and conquered others. It won a Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than a million copies around the world. He was born in Boston in 1937 to a physician father and a mother who was a teacher and a concert pianist. She taught him to read when he was three and he also learned to play the piano and developed a love of languages. Thinking his professional life would be in science, he decided to focus on the humanities at school, including Latin and Greek. After graduating from Harvard, he moved to England to pursue a PhD in physiology at Cambridge and became an expert on salt absorption in the gall bladder. He returned to the USA, and then his travels took him to New Guinea where he developed a passionate interest in ornithology and a lifelong love of the island which he’s continued to visit for the past 50 years. He has learned 12 languages, speaking several of them fluently, and has published six books and hundreds of articles. His most recent book, Upheaval, examines how nations cope with crisis and change. Jared lives in Los Angeles with his wife Marie, a clinical psychologist. They have grown-up twin sons. BOOK CHOICE: The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle LUXURY ITEM: Six cases of Scharzhofberger Kabinett, a Riesling wine from the Saar Basin CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Bach’s Cantata 50: "Nun ist das Heil" Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.4	Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Disks Podcast. Every week I
0:09.7	ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them
0:14.4	if they were cast away to a desert island. For right reasons, the music is shorter than
0:19.7	the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.
0:30.0	Music Radio Music
0:42.8	My cast away this week is the academic and author Jared Diamond. By day he is the
0:47.6	professor of geography at the University of California but to describe him as versatile
0:52.8	would be an understatement. He's a true polymath whose expertise and interests go beyond
0:58.0	geography and history to encompass a dazzling array of allergies, or mythology, physiology,
1:03.8	ecology and anthropology and evolutionary biology. As well as being a recipient of the MacArthur
1:09.8	Foundation's genius grant he is a best-selling science author, equally renowned for his engaging
1:15.7	lucid prose and his pioneering theories about the biggest questions in human history.
1:21.7	Why do cultures develop as they do? Why do civilizations collapse? How should societies react
1:27.3	in moments of existential crisis? This big picture thinking might be down to his skills as a
1:33.0	linguist and a passion for travel. He's studied 12 languages and has been a regular visitor to New
1:38.8	Guinea for over 50 years. He says, I found that the more things you're interested in and the more you
1:44.9	learn the richer the framework into which you can fit any new thing. So synthesis, if you do it at all,
1:51.1	gets professionally easier with time. It's no surprise that older people can do better at synthesis
1:56.4	because they've been learning their entire lives. Jared Diamond, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
2:01.6	Thank you and so pleasure to be with you. For you having such a wide ranging field of study
2:06.4	must increase the opportunities for intellectual synthesis. How does studying so many different
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