Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of the more frustrating books I've ever had to deal with. Diamond says many relatively innocuous, obvious, non-groundbreaking things about anthropology and macrohistory, and when he gets into details he's kind of hit-or-miss. Possibly most frustrating is that he writes macrohistory but provides an incomplete set of explanations for things, which almost defeats the purpose of writing his book. He discusses the Neolithic Revolution and the Columbian Exchange at length, for instance, but totally drops the ball on the fairly important issue of China.
Somehow this has led to his books being widely fellated among the reading public.
Macrohistory isn't very interesting to me.
Diamond is just this generation's Toynbee, with similar flaws. From what I have heard,
1491 by Charles Mann is pretty much better in every way on what the Americas were actually like before Columbus.
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For basically anybody wanting to read an overview of trade and warfare in the second millennium, I recommend
Power and Plenty, by Findlay and O'Rourke, which is a very good guide to the secondary material (except, apparently, in Southeast Asia, but nobody cares about that).
Anything Dennis Showalter has ever written is worth reading for both the casual history reader and the specialist.
On the last four hundred years in Chinese history, Jonathan Spence,
The Search for Modern China is a very good introduction.
For the collapse of two different, yet eerily similar states, I recommend Frederic Wakeman,
The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Order in the 17th Century and Guy Halsall,
Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568. For a counterpoint to Halsall, you should try Peter Heather,
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and
Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development, and the Birth of Europe.
If you want to feel good about yourself and learn about Germany during the
Aufklärung at the same time, the play
Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is pretty damn good.
On the Byzantines, the best introduction in one volume is Warren Treadgold,
A History of the Byzantine State and Society, supplemented by the articles in Jonathan Shepard (ed.),
The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire.
Christopher Tyerman,
God's War is one of the best single volumes on the Crusades, chiefly from the Latin point of view, but with more than a fair shake given to the Greek and Muslim perspectives.
On the First World War, anything Hew Strachan has ever written is good; he is putting out a three-volume detailed study of the war, society, economy, and international relations, of which the first volume,
To Arms, has been published. He has also condensed the entire war into a 300-page book that is also more than worth looking at for the nonspecialist.
On an entirely different note, I have always been entertained by Bill Simmons' sportswriting, and his
Book of Basketball was very lulzy in that vein; if you like his columns, you will enjoy the book.
