Guns, Germs and Steel
In the introduction, Diamond writes about the time he met Yali, a man from New Guinea, in 1972. Yali asked "Why is it that you white people [made] so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" By "cargo", Yali meant inventions and objects that are made in a factory. Diamond thought about this question for years, which led to him writing the book.