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REVIEW: Road Belong Cargo, by Peter Lawrence

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Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea, Peter Lawrence (Manchester University Press, 1964). When I was twelve years old, my grandfather gave me a copy of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. This single fact probably goes farther than any other in explaining How I Got This Way: the book blew my mind and kicked off a lifelong fascination with big-picture, multidisciplinary investigations of how the world, well, Got This Way. (Or, if you’re a hereditarian: roughly 25% of my genes come from a guy who thought this was a good book to buy for a twelve-year-old girl.) You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. (Back before Diamond’s second career as a pop-science public intellectual, he was an ornithologist focusing on the birds of northern Melanesia.)1 They chatted for a while ab

REVIEW: Road Belong Cargo, by Peter Lawrence Jane Psmith Apr 21, 2025 277 58 44 Share Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea , Peter Lawrence (Manchester University Press, 1964). When I was twelve years old, my grandfather gave me a copy of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel . This single fact probably goes farther than any other in explaining How I Got This Way: the book blew my mind and kicked off a lifelong fascination with big-picture, multidisciplinary investigations of how the world, well, Got This Way. (Or, if you’re a hereditari

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