Hard to know what you mean when you say "like GGS" (answers the same questions? same sort of scope? same sort of argument?), but if you're looking for a fun-to-read, big-scope, tells-you-about-how-the-world-got-to-be-the-way-it-is, mixture-of-anthropology/geography/history sort of book, Charles Mann's 1491 and 1493 are both excellent and fascinating. They aren't trying to answer the same question as Diamond, but they give a lot of in-depth discussion about what happened with the European conquest of the Americas and the wider global consequences of "Columbian exchange." Mann is a journalist but he does a great job of engaging with academic work, but in a readable and thought-provoking way. It has been very well-received.
Separately, you could also just read GGS and take some of its arguments with a grain of salt. It is not a "dangerous" book (those who think it is racist are making quite a strange and unwarranted conclusion in my opinion) and it will not hurt you to read it. It makes an interesting though somewhat hand-waving argument, and much of the opprobrium directed at it is (again, in my view) a bit overheated. It is not a book so full of nonsense (in the sense that a lot of pseudo-history, Holocaust denial, etc. is) that you will do yourself damage trying to grapple with it. I am not sure Diamond has hit upon the only possible answer to his question (why did Europe become the first major global power?), but it does not strike me as a priori invalid to look to geographical/environmental factors as a place for a possible answer. Diamond is a common whipping-boy for academics (in part, no doubt, because he is so well-read and popular despite not being a historian) but he's not intellectually dishonest (much less evil, but you wouldn't guess that from the way in which academics feel free to make a spectacle of their attacks on his work).
Two books that cover the "guns" and "steel" angles covered by Diamond are William McNeill's The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 and Geoffrey Parker's The Military Revolution Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. Both works are classics in their respective fields and are fairly well-respected works. Although they are not entirely above criticism, this anthology adds a lot of qualifications to the Parker thesis, they are, like Diamond, accessible entry works into the big picture.
For "germs", Alfred Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 is one of the seminal works of its time and still an interesting read for the non-specialist and Crosby later wrote Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 that examined Europe's empire-building process as an ecological one that was fundamentally transformative for the globe.
For a 'global' history that deals with the "Rise of the West", you can't go wrong with Robert Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century.
It's great--and if you read Marks' book, and then read Diamond's book, you'll see all the incredibly crucial things that Diamond ignores, misses, or just gets wrong.
The only problem with Marks' book is that it's a bit "textbooky", i.e. it doesn't have a gripping storyline...
So some readers (not me) might find it boring.
I very much enjoyed Ian Morris' Why the West Rules (and also War - What is it good for?). It is also an exploration of geographic determinism as per Diamond's arguments in GGS however it does have numerous issues as one would expect from any book attempting to tackle such a complex and comprehensive topic as the sum total of human development. I feel the major difference between the two is that Morris seems far more open about the failings of his own writing and actually recognises that key developments in history were undoubtedly driven more by the actions of individual humans.
edit: Got the book title wrong!
2nd edit: In response to a presumably deleted reply - By actions of individual humans I mean more in the sense that there seems to be far more awareness that things could have turned out differently than some sort of espousal of the Great Man theory. As an example, he spends quite some time exploring why China turned inwards rather than outwards (i.e. the rise and fall of the Treasure Fleets) with far more reference to politics and human geography than Diamond would apply in my opinion.
Two books which have the epic sweep of Guns, Germans, and Steel but are more widely respected these days are both more circumscribed in their geography than GSS while, if anything, cover even wider swaths of time: Europe Between the Oceans: 9,000 BCE to AD 1,000 by Barry Cunliffe and The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony. Both are very well respected and cover similar subjects--the rise of Indo-Europeans--but take slightly different approaches and so make slightly different arguments based. Cunliffe is an archeologist, and makes an argument for Anatolian origins wheras Anthony uses more linguistic evidence and argues for Steppe origins (a modified "Kurgan Hypothesis"). Both very interesting and useful for specialists and general readers, and I haven't seen a good argument as to why one is definitely better than the other.
One book that's never on these lists in Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital, and European States, 990-1992. It's an amazing book that brings you from the post-Roman feudal order to the modern welfare state, written by the single most historical sociologist (period). It is basically the beginning of all discussions of state-making, and quite frankly the end to many of them as well. It's read by most sociologists, but has made no impression on general readers (though European historians are also know to cite it and love it).
GGS seeks to answer the question of "why did Western Europeans come to dominate the world" phrased in the book as "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
I think we all know what he means by that question, but to really answer it one has to delve into the premises of the question itself, rather than accepting it on its face.
The majority of European history has been precisely the opposite of the premise: Europeans have historically had little of value to trade, and sought access to the trading regions of India and China. This is not mentioned at all in GGS. To answer the question of how the shift to European dominance of global trade took place, you could check out Empire of Cotton which tracks this process for cotton in particular which was for a period of time the most valuable manufactured good in global trade.
Another recent book I would recommend is Pathfinders: A global history of exploration which seeks to answer a different question: how were the present links of global trade established and why did the Europeans take the lead in forging these links? Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin is an older book that treads over much the same ground.
What is the beef with "guns germs and steel"? The book seemed well done to me .
My understanding of GGS is that it is a "grand theory" style of book -- where it attempts to explain huge swathes of time as part of a single, underlying cause. These tend to be fundamentally flawed, simply because reality is inevitably too complicated to be able to be reduced into a single origin point, even though it is deeply satisfying to do so. So I think any time you read a book in that vein, you need to be conscious of the way it simplifies its subject.
If you are conscious, however, I think it's possible to read "grand theory" books in the context of how underlying or previously unconsidered elements have shaped the trajectory of events (as long as you remember they were not the exclusive or even necessarily primary causes of those events).
So with that precedent, the two books I've enjoyed that I would recommend -- similar to GGS in their goals, rather than their contents -- would be these:
First, Dan L. Smail's On Deep History and the Brain, which looks at the role of drugs and brain chemistry in shaping human actions over time. Smail is, among medievalists, at least, respected and considered thorough and competent; this book may not have 100% agreement among scholars but it's definitely not ridiculed by historians. I can't speak to its reception among scientists, unfortunately.
The second book I'd reccomend would be William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, which is a little more on par with GGS in that most people consider it flawed and outdated, but my understanding is that its significance in a broader historical context is still widely accepted (that is, historians still appreciate what McNeill was trying to do, even as they don't agree with the details of his analysis and conclusions; where there's no such broader respect among historians for GGS).
The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz is a book which uses similar environmental deterministic methods to explain Europe's ascension to world economic supremacy. It also examines in great detail the economies of early modern Europe and China. I have only ever read that Pomeranz makes thoughtful interpretations of the evidence and that the only criticisms due to the book are criticisms of environmental determinism initself. I (just a history undergrad) find his basic argument very compelling: that Europe and China had similar economic development at the beginning of the early modern period and that Europe's great divergence was enabled largely by the wealth from colonies in the new world.
For a large-scale history about the transformative relationships between humans and things, check out Richard Bulliet's new The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions (2016). It's a brilliant book by a top-notch historian. His specialty was early Islam, but he's really branched out from there. If you want to know more, he did an AMA on it just a few months back.
The book 1491 and 1493 are great if you want to learn about the Americas before or after Columbus.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
Are you looking for more environmental history? Or more great divergence type of stuff.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.
If you're looking to emulate the entertainment portion of the experience, even though it's fiction I recommend Nael Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle followed by Cryptonomicon. While these do not strictly speaking occupy the same intentional headspace I found myself thinking of Guns, Germs & Steel & Collapse a lot when I read them. Partially due to their scope, but also from the interweaving of historical characters(fictionalized, but still) with domination/evolution of world zeitgeist over time. I especially thought he wrote the effect of evolving science and technology on the mindset of the characters and the functioning of society hit a bunch of the same notes as the Diamond books.