The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond

This book is a very interesting read.  It looks at the great variety of human societies and how they deal with or conceive of some basic human activities.  The book is divided into areas of human endeavour and life.:  there are chapters looking at warfare and conflict resolution, child rearing, aging and the elderly, diet, dealing with strangers, danger and risk, languages, multilingualism and the disappearance of world languages.
Diamond frames his book as an attempt to see what is valuable in traditional societies and how we might benefit by adopting some of these elements in modern western society.  I don't see that though. For me, the most important or valuable element of the book is the sheer variety of ways of life, thinking and understanding that humans have developed over the millennia, in response to different environments, social conditions and simply just because.  It offers a huge shakeup to cultural  self-centredness and western-centric thinking.  The book underscores the sheer extent of possibility for us humans.
It offers background to understanding some of the cultural differences between different societies - for example the stronger family-focused element in Turkish society, which on the surface seems modern and western in many ways.  You could see it as a surviving element from an earlier culture where the state did not provide the kind of security and support that we are used to in western Europe and North America, and where family was the main source of security and safety when faced with economic or social difficulties.  Also, as a surviving element of village life when people's families remained close-by and provided a strong social network - true also for my mother and her generation (somehting which I observed but couldn't really be part of...)
His accounts of New Guinea are also in themselves very interesting.  It's hard to imagine how such a small space came to be inhabited by so many different cultures and languages (over 1000 distinct languages from different families and types) in such a density without somehow blending and losing their distinctness.  Reminds me a bit of the Caucasus, especially Azerbaijan.