book review of sapiens a brief history of humankind

3 mind-blowing facts about humans that I learned from reading 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind'

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" Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " is a bestseller praised by Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
The nonfiction book explores the history and evolution of humans and the modern world.
Here's a summary of 3 facts I learned and how they helped expand my understanding of humanity.

As an avid reader, my understanding of the world has greatly expanded through novels. I'm accustomed to looking at people through the emotional and psychological lens of relationships and community, always exploring how different social factors and personal histories make us so unique.

And while I've mostly preferred learning through fictional stories and characters, the non-fiction bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " not only amplified my understanding of the human condition but also deepened my understanding of human s. The book, a biological, intellectual, and economic account of humankind, explained the biological "why" behind everything I've ever known about people, including myself.

book review of sapiens a brief history of humankind

Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, an internationally recognized historian and philosopher, introduced me to concepts that explore the very foundation of how humans evolved from nomadic apes to philosophical beings who ponder the meaning of life. I've been spouting quotes and information from this book ever since I finished reading it, so here are the three most fascinating concepts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."

3 amazing facts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind":

Self-preservation is a biological instinct that greatly impacted the course of humankind — and explains some of our problems today..

The early developments of Homo sapiens were entirely biological, centered around sustaining and creating life. Yet some of our evolution's disadvantages heavily outweighed the advantages.

For instance, in the development of the agricultural revolution, humans found that wheat was incredibly difficult to farm, not economically secure, and not even that nutritious. So why did we invest time and energy into farming anyway? According to Harari, farming fulfilled our biological needs by helping communities settle down, give birth to more babies in a shorter amount of time, and feed a larger number of people on a smaller space of land.

To put it into today's terms, the pursuit of an easier life often generates greater hardships. It's called the luxury trap: As Harari puts it, "luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations." For example, we used to mails letter when we had something to say. Now, we send and receive dozens of emails every day, many of us considering it a necessity to have email access on our phones for even quicker responses. Immediate email correspondence was a luxury that has become a 21st-century necessity, spawning new obligations to be attached to our phones.

It's nearly impossible to break the luxury trap cycle: It's spawned by our biological desire to make life easier so we can conserve time, energy, or money. But humankind's instinct to cater to ourselves also has some positives. It's helped us evolve from farming wheat to generating significant technological advances and boosting our cognitive capacity for empathy, to name a few things.

Because we create societal values, we can determine which values hold the most meaning.

When humans began to trade nomadic life for settlements, we created values to help govern societies. Our societal agreements are based on inter-subjective beliefs — the foundations of society are agreed-upon concepts of law, money, religion, and nations that link billions of humans to an imagined order that does not exist outside of our consciousness. Even the idea of "rights" is not something that exists in biology: It's an imagined order that controls the population because enough people believe in it.

The idea that we fabricated the social concepts that tie us to our political views and institutions might spur an existential crisis, but learning this was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. While fully abandoning the greatest societal contracts would create planet-wide chaos, it can be helpful to remember individual (and often invisible) pressures that we feel to be constantly achieving or fitting into a particular mold don't have as much control over us as we think. If we question some of these imagined constructs, we might find ourselves closer to intellectual freedom.

Happiness is a relatively recent focus for humankind.

As Harari points out, happiness is an incalculable abstraction. The closest measurable figure is pleasure, a chemical sensation that keeps humans alive by rewarding us when we eat or reproduce — not exactly what most of us think when we imagine self-fulfillment.

Yet, as the cognitive revolution carried humankind through advances that would shape all of planet Earth, the importance of happiness emerged. Happiness is subjective, the scale of which has dramatically changed from the Middle Ages to now. But it is also the unit many of us use to determine if our lives feel worthwhile.

In much of the history of humankind, we ignored the idea that happiness drove any kind of evolution. But as we grew through rapid technological evolutions, our motivation has focused more on our subjective well-being. Humankind's search for a meaningful life is how we've managed to survive a history's worth of hardships, such as defending a country's values in a war or exploring new hobbies during a pandemic.

The biological rules that dictated the survival of Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years have changed in only the past few decades. With our advances in medicine, agriculture, and technology, humans have been able to shift our focus from survival and reproduction to happiness and meaning. With this realization that humanity's sole purpose is no longer to survive but thrive , we can prioritize self-actualization.

The bottom line

I learned so many profound theories from this book, and it broadened my understanding of humanity. While we evolved through our survivalist need for self-preservation, the cognitive revolution spawned societies founded on rules and values, some of which now create new barriers to our happiness and wellbeing.

More importantly, learning about our evolutionary history deepened my empathy for humankind and even towards myself. Thanks to this book, my view of my place in the world has shifted, as I remember that I wouldn't be here, typing this, if not for the billions of decisions my ancestors made. It's a borderline magical (and ok, a little overwhelming) realization. It makes me want to pursue a more meaningful life, and extend grace towards others and myself whenever I can. Gaining this perspective is one of the best takeaways a book could possibly give.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind review – thrilling story, dark message

W here do we come from? Our insatiable curiosity about our origins has provoked a raft of different answers to that question. Was the invention of cooking the reason for man’s evolutionary success or was our facility for culture the key? Was the progress of humanity driven by kindness; or by warfare and aggression? Did our earliest ancestors live in promiscuous communes, as depicted in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s bestselling Sex at Dawn ? Or in respectable monogamy, as argued in Lynn Saxon’s less successful Sex at Dusk ? One of the charms of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is that it avoids such simplistic explanations. Instead, it offers a bravura retelling of the human story seasoned with more personal reflections on man’s tenancy of the planet. The book’s surface is brilliantly clear, witty and erudite but its underlying message is dark.

Harari organises humankind around four different milestones. About 70,000 years ago, the cognitive revolution kickstarted our history, and about 12,000 years ago the agricultural revolution speeded it up. Then came a long process of unifying mankind and colonising the Earth until, finally, the scientific revolution began about 500 years ago. It is still in progress and may yet finish us all off.

The first of these – the cognitive revolution – was the real game-changer; a genetic mutation that altered the inner wiring of Homo sapiens , enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate in an altogether new type of language which could not only convey information but also create imagined worlds. It was this ability to forge common myths that enabled H sapiens to cooperate flexibly in large numbers, and thus to see off rivals such as the Neanderthals, wipe out hostile animals and cultivate crops. Similarly, says Harari, it was by building pyramids – in the mind as much as on the ground; imagined orders and hierarchies – that humanity advanced.

If Sapiens is at its best in the early chapters, when the scarcity of evidence gives full scope to Harari’s audacious imagination and gift for exposition, it remains consistently fresh and lively as it advances into the historical era, which it interprets in terms of three potentially universal orders – money, empire and religion. Harari is a brilliant populariser: a ruthless synthesiser; a master storyteller unafraid to stage old set pieces such as Cortés and Moctezuma; and an entertainer constantly enlivening his tale with chatty asides and modern parallels.

The philosophy that emerges, however, is not what you’d necessarily expect from an Israeli with a background in medieval military history. History, for Harari, is largely made up of accidents; and his real theme is the price that the planet and its other inhabitants have paid for humankind’s triumphant progress. There are indicators of this in an elegiac passage on the destruction of the megafauna of Australasia and South America and a rapturous account of the life of Buddha, but it is only when he reaches the modern era that Harari brings his own views to the fore. He sees modern agriculture’s treatment of animals as one of the worst crimes in history, doubts whether our extraordinary material advances have made us any happier than we were in the past, and regards modern capitalism as an ugly prison. What is more, current developments in biology may soon lead to the replacement of H sapiens by completely different beings, enjoying godlike qualities and abilities.

It takes broad brushstrokes to cover a vast canvas and, inevitably, some of the paintwork is a little rough. Occasionally Harari makes it all too simple and sounds like a primary school teacher being cute. He defers too much to current orthodoxies – the discussion of patriarchy resists the logic of its own arguments for fear of affronting feminists – and reflects current academic fashion by, for example, hugely overstating the role of science in European colonialism. Napoleon may have taken 165 scholars with him when he invaded Egypt but the scramble for Africa later in the century was more about machine guns, searchlights and metallurgy.

That said, Sapiens is one of those rare books that lives up to the publisher’s blurb. It really is thrilling and breath-taking; it actually does question our basic narrative of the world.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is published by Harvill Secker (£25). Click here to buy it for £18.99 with free UK p&p

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Sapiens ? a critical review.

I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind . It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 billion years of pre-history and history.

Fascinating but flawed

Harari’s pictures of the earliest men and then the foragers and agrarians are fascinating; but he breathlessly rushes on to take us past the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, to the arrival of religion, the scientific revolution, industrialisation, the advent of artificial intelligence and the possible end of humankind. His contention is that Homo sapiens , originally an insignificant animal foraging in Africa has become ‘the terror of the ecosystem’ (p465). There is truth in this, of course, but his picture is very particular. He is best, in my view, on the modern world and his far-sighted analysis of what we are doing to ourselves struck many chords with me.

Harari is a better social scientist than philosopher, logician or historian

Nevertheless, in my opinion the book is also deeply flawed in places and Harari is a much better social scientist than he is philosopher, logician or historian. His critique of modern social ills is very refreshing and objective, his piecing together of the shards of pre-history imaginative and appear to the non-specialist convincing, but his understanding of some historical periods and documents is much less impressive – demonstrably so, in my view.

Misunderstanding the medieval world

Harari is not good on the medieval world, or at least the medieval church. He suggests that ‘premodern’ religion asserted that everything important to know about the world ‘was already known’ (p279) so there was no curiosity or expansion of learning. When does he think this view ceased? He makes it much too late. He gives the (imagined) example of a thirteenth-century peasant asking a priest about spiders and being rebuffed because such knowledge was not in the Bible. It’s hard to know where to begin in saying how wrong a concept this is.

For example, in the thirteenth century the friars, so often depicted as lazy and corrupt, were central to the learning of the universities. Moreover they were, at that time, able to teach independently of diktats from the Church. As a result, there was an exchange of scholarship between national boundaries and demanding standards were set. The Church also set up schools throughout much of Europe, so as more people became literate there was a corresponding increase in debate among the laity as well as among clerics. Huge library collections were amassed by monks who studied both religious and classical texts. Their scriptoria effectively became the research institutes of their day. One surviving example of this is the fascinating library of the Benedictines at San Marco in Florence. Commissioned in 1437, it became the first public library in Europe. This was a huge conceptual breakthrough in the dissemination of knowledge: the ordinary citizens of that great city now had access to the profoundest ideas from the classical period onwards.

And there is Thomas Aquinas. Usually considered to be the most brilliant mind of the thirteenth century, he wrote on ethics, natural law, political theory, Aristotle – the list goes on. Harari forgets to mention him – today, as all know, designated a saint in the Roman Catholic church.

Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras

In fact, it was the Church – through Peter Abelard in the twelfth century– that initiated the idea that a single authority was not sufficient for the establishment of knowledge, but that disputation was required to train the mind as well as the lecture for information. This was a breakthrough in thinking that set the pattern of university life for the centuries ahead.

Or what about John of Salisbury (twelfth-century bishop), the greatest social thinker since Augustine, who bequeathed to us the function of the rule of law and the concept that even the monarch is subject to law and may be removed by the people if he breaks it. Following Cicero he rejected dogmatic claims to certainty and asserted instead that ‘probable truth’ was the best we could aim for, which had to be constantly re-evaluated and revised. Harari is wrong therefore, to state that Vespucci (1504) was the first to say ‘we don’t know’ (p321).

So, historically Harari tends to draw too firm a dividing line between the medieval and modern eras (p285). He is good on the more modern period but the divide is manifest enough without overstating the case as he does.

Short-sighted reductionism

His passage about human rights not existing in nature is exactly right, but his treatment of the US Declaration of Independence is surely completely mistaken (p123). To ‘translate’ it as he does into a statement about evolution is like ‘translating’ a rainbow into a mere geometric arc, or better, ‘translating’ a landscape into a map. Of course, neither process is a translation for to do so is an impossibility. They are what they are. The one is an inspiration, the other an analysis. It is not a matter of one being untrue, the other true – for both landscapes and maps are capable of conveying truths of different kinds.

The Declaration is an aspirational statement about the rights that ought to be accorded to each individual under the rule of law in a post-Enlightenment nation predicated upon Christian principles. Harari’s ‘translation’ is a statement about what our era (currently) believes in a post-Darwinian culture about humanity’s evolutionary drives and our ‘selfish’ genes. ‘Biology’ may tell us those things but human experience and history tell a different story: there is altruism as well as egoism; there is love as well as fear and hatred; there is morality as well as amorality. The sword is not the only way in which events and epochs have been made. Indeed, to make biology/biochemistry the final irreducible way of perceiving human behaviour, as Harari seems to do, seems tragically short-sighted.

Religious illiteracy

I’m not surprised that the book is a bestseller in a (by and large) religiously illiterate society; and though it has a lot of merit in other areas, its critique of Judaism and Christianity is not historically respectable. A mere six lines of conjecture (p242) on the emergence of monotheism from polytheism – stated as fact – is indefensible. It lacks objectivity. The great world-transforming Abrahamic religion emerging from the deserts in the early Bronze Age period (as it evidently did) with an utterly new understanding of the sole Creator God is such an enormous change. It simply can’t be ignored in this way if the educated reader is to be convinced by his reconstructions.

Harari is demonstrably very shaky in his representation of what Christians believe

Harari is also demonstrably very shaky in his representation of what Christians believe. For example, his contention that belief in the Devil makes Christianity dualistic (equal independent good and evil gods) is simply untenable. One of the very earliest biblical texts (Book of Job) shows God allowing Satan to attack Job but irresistibly restricting his methods (Job 1:12). Later, Jesus banishes Satan from individuals (Mark 1:25 et al .) and the final book of the Bible shows God destroying Satan (Revelation 20:10). Not much dualism there! It’s all, of course, a profound mystery – but it’s quite certainly not caused by dualism according to the Bible. Harari either does not know his Bible or is choosing to misrepresent it. He also doesn’t know his Thomas Hardy who believed (some of the time!) precisely what Harari says ‘nobody in history’ believed, namely that God is evil – as evidenced in a novel like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or his poem The Convergence of the Twain .

Fumbling the problem of evil

We see another instance of Harari’s lack of objectivity in the way he deals with the problem of evil (p246). He states the well-worn idea that if we posit free will as the solution, that raises the further question: if God ‘knew in advance’ (Harari’s words) that the evil would be done why did he create the doer?

I would expect a scholar to present both sides of the argument, not a populist one-sided account as Harari does

But to be objective the author would need to raise the counter-question that if there is no free will, how can there be love and how can there be truth? Automatons without free will are coerced and love cannot exist between them – by definition. Again, if everything is predetermined then so is the opinion I have just expressed. In that case it has no validity as a measure of truth – it was predetermined either by chance forces at the Big Bang or by e.g. what I ate for breakfast which dictated my mood. These are age-old problems without easy solutions but I would expect a scholar to present both sides of the argument, not a populist one-sided account as Harari does.

Moreover, in Christian theology God created both time and space, but exists outside them. So the Christian God does not know anything ‘in advance’ which is a term applicable only to those who live inside the time–space continuum i.e. humanity. The Christian philosopher Boethius saw this first in the sixth century; theologians know it – but apparently Harari doesn’t, and he should.

Ignoring the resurrection

In common with so many, Harari is unable to explain why Christianity ‘took over the mighty Roman Empire' (p243) but calls it ‘one of history’s strangest twists’. So it is, but one explanation that should be considered is the resurrection of Christ which of course would fully account for it – if people would give the idea moment’s thought. But to the best of my knowledge there is no mention of it (even as an influential belief) anywhere in the book.

Harari is unable to explain why Christianity ‘took over the mighty Roman Empire'

The standard reason given for such an absence is that ‘such things don’t happen in history: dead men don’t rise.’ But that, I fear, is logically a hopeless answer. The speaker believes it didn’t happen because they have already presupposed that God is not there to do it. Drop the presupposition, and suddenly the whole situation changes: in the light of that thought it now becomes perfectly feasible that this ‘strange twist’ was part of the divine purpose. And the funny thing is that unlike other religions, this is precisely where Christianity is most insistent on its historicity . Peter, Paul, the early church in general were convinced that Jesus was alive and they knew as well as we do that dead men are dead – and they knew better than us that us that crucified men are especially dead! The very first Christian sermons (about AD 33) were about the facts of their experience – the resurrection of Jesus – not about morals or religion or the future.

A one-sided view of the Church

Harari is right to highlight the appalling record of human warfare and there is no point trying to excuse the Church from its part in this. I have written at length about this elsewhere, as have far more able people. But do we really think that because everyone in Europe was labelled Catholic or Protestant (‘ cuius regio, eius religio ’) that the wars they fought were about religion ?

If the Church is cited as a negative influence, why, in a scholarly book, is its positive influence not also cited?

As the Cambridge Modern History points out about the appalling Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 (which event Harari cites on p241) – the Paris mob would as soon kill Catholics as Protestants – and did. It was the result of political intrigue, sexual jealousy, human barbarism and feud. Oxford Professor Keith Ward points out ‘religious wars are a tiny minority of human conflicts’ in his book Is Religion Dangerous? If the Church is being cited as a negative influence, why, in a scholarly book, is its undeniably unrivalled positive influence over the last 300 years (not to mention all the previous years) not also cited? It’s simply not good history to ignore the good educational and social impact of the Church. Both sides need to feature. [1]

Philosophical fault-lines

I wonder too about Harari’s seeming complacency on occasion, for instance about where economic progress has brought us to. Is it acceptable for him to write (on p296): ‘When calamity strikes an entire region, worldwide relief efforts are usually successful in preventing the worst. People still suffer from numerous depredations, humiliations and poverty-related illnesses but in most countries nobody is starving to death’? Tell that to the people of Haiti seven years after the earthquake with two and a half million still, according to the UN, needing humanitarian aid. Or the people of South Sudan dying of thirst and starvation as they try to reach refugee camps. There are sixty million refugees living in appalling poverty and distress at this moment . In the light of those facts, I think Harari’s comment is rather unsatisfactory.

But there is a larger philosophical fault-line running through the whole book which constantly threatens to break its conclusions in pieces. His whole contention is predicated on the idea that humankind is merely the product of accidental evolutionary forces and this means he is blind to seeing any real intentionality in history. It has direction certainly, but he believes it is the direction of an iceberg, not a ship.

Many of his opening remarks are just unwarranted assumptions

This would be all right if he were straightforward in stating that all his arguments are predicated on the assumption that, as Bertrand Russell said, ‘Man is…but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms’ and utterly without significance. But instead, he does what a philosopher would call ‘begging the question’. That is, he assumes from the start what his contention requires him to prove – namely that mankind is on its own and without any sort of divine direction. Harari ought to have stated his assumed position at the start, but signally failed to do so. The result is that many of his opening remarks are just unwarranted assumptions based on that grandest of all assumptions: that humanity is cut adrift on a lonely planet, itself adrift in a drifting galaxy in a dying universe. Evidence please! – that humanity is ‘nothing but’ a biological entity and that human consciousness is not a pale (and fundamentally damaged) reflection of the divine mind.

The fact that (he says) Sapiens has been around for a long time, emerged by conquest of the Neanderthals and has a bloody and violent history has no logical connection to whether or not God made him (‘her’ for Harari) into a being capable of knowing right from wrong, perceiving God in the world and developing into Michelangelo, Mozart and Mother Teresa as well as into Nero and Hitler. To insist that such sublime or devilish beings are ‘no more than’ glorified apes is to ignore the elephant in the room: the small differences in our genetic codes are the very differences that may reasonably point to divine intervention – because the result is so shockingly disproportionate between ourselves and our nearest relatives. I’ve watched chimpanzees and the great apes; I love to do so (and especially adore gorillas!) but…so near, yet so so far.

Arguable assumptions

Here are a few short-hand examples of the author’s many assumptions to check out in context:

‘accidental genetic mutations…it was pure chance’ (p23)
‘no justice outside the common imagination of human beings’ (p31)
‘things that really exist’ (p35)

This last is such a huge leap of unwarranted faith. His concept of what ‘really exists’ seems to be ‘anything material’ but, in his opinion, nothing beyond this does ‘exist’ (his word). Actually, humans are mostly sure that immaterial things certainly exist: love, jealousy, rage, poverty, wealth, for starters. Dark matter also may make up most of the universe – it exists, we are told, but we can’t measure it.

His rendition of how biologists see the human condition is as one-sided as his treatment of earlier topics.

Harari’s final chapters are quite brilliant in their range and depth and hugely interesting about the possible future with the advent of AI – with or without Sapiens. His rendition, however, of how biologists see the human condition is as one-sided as his treatment of earlier topics. To say that our ‘subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters’ (p432) but by ‘serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin’ is to take the behaviourist view to the exclusion of all other biochemical/psychiatric science. Recent studies have concluded that human behaviour and well-being are the result not just of the amount of serotonin etc that we have in our bodies, but that our response to external events actually alters the amount of serotonin, dopamine etc which our bodies produce. It is two-way traffic. Our choices therefore are central. The way we behave actually affects our body chemistry, as well as vice versa. Harari is averse to using the word ‘mind’ and prefers ‘brain’ but the jury is out about whethe/how these two co-exist. There is one glance at this idea on page 458: without dismissing it he allows it precisely four lines, which for such a major ‘game-changer’ to the whole argument is a deeply worrying omission.

I liked his bold discussion about the questions of human happiness that historians and others are not asking, but was surprised by his two pages on ‘The Meaning of Life’ which I thought slightly disingenuous. ‘From a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning…Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan.’ (p438, my italics). The first sentence is fine – of course , that is true! How could it be otherwise? Science deals with how things happen, not why in terms of meaning or metaphysics . To look for meta physical answers in the physical sciences is ridiculous – they can’t be found there. It’s like looking for a sandpit in a swimming pool. Distinguished scientists like Sir Martin Rees and John Polkinghorne, at the very forefront of their profession, understand this and have written about the separation of the two ‘magisteria’. Science is about physical facts not meaning; we look to philosophy, history, religion and ethics for that. Harari’s second sentence is a non-sequitur – an inference that does not follow from the premise. God’s ‘cosmic plan’ may well be to use the universe he has set up to create beings both on earth and beyond (in time and eternity) which are glorious beyond our wildest dreams. I rather think he has already – when I consider what Sapiens has achieved.

A curiously encouraging end

I found the very last page of the book curiously encouraging:

We are more powerful than ever before…Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. (p466)

Exactly! Time then for a change. Better to live in a world where we are accountable – to a just and loving God.

Harari is a brilliant writer, but one with a very decided agenda. He is excellent within his field but spreads his net too wide till some of the mesh breaks – allowing all sorts of confusing foreign bodies to pass in and out – and muddies the water. His failure to think clearly and objectively in areas outside his field will leave educated Christians unimpressed.

[1] See my book The Evil That Men Do . (Sacristy Press, 2016)

Marcus Paul

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

by Yuval Noah Harari ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 10, 2015

The great debates of history aired out with satisfying vigor.

Harari (History/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) provides an immersion into the important revolutions that shaped world history: cognitive, agricultural and scientific. The book was originally published in Israel in 2011 and became a best-seller.

There is enormous gratification in reading books of this nature, an encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view. As Harari firmly believes, history hinges on stories: some stories for understanding, others prompting people to act cooperatively toward common goals. Of course, these stories—“ ‘fictions,’ ‘social constructs’ or ‘imagined realities’ ”—can be humble or evil, inclusive or self-serving, but they hold the power of belief. Harari doesn’t avoid the distant past, when humans “were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish,” but he is a skeptic and rightfully relies on specific source material to support his arguments—though he is happy to offer conjectures. Harari launches fully into his story with the cognitive revolution, when our brains were rewired, now more intelligent and creative, with language, gossip and myths to fashion the stories that, from politicians to priests to sorcerers, serve to convince people of certain ideas and beliefs. The agricultural revolution (“lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers”) comes next and firmly establishes the intersubjectivity of imagined orders: hierarchies, money, religion, gender issues, “communication network[s] linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.” Throughout, the author revels in the chaos of history. He discusses the good and bad of empires and science, suggests that modern economic history comes down to a single word (“growth”), rues the loss of familial and societal safety nets, and continues to find wonder in the concept that “the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system.”

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0062316097

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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Oct. 20 Release For 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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A Good Reed Review

Reviews, commentary, and stories from a musical engineer's perspective, book review: ‘sapiens: a brief history of humankind’ – a story of where we came from and where we might be going.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , by Yuval Noah Harari, was first published in the U.S. in 2015, and it took the country by storm. It quickly became a New York Times best seller and is used in numerous history courses around the country. Great Britain saw its English language release a year earlier in 2014, but the author’s countrymen saw it first published in his native Hebrew a few years before that in 2011. Beyond that, the book has been translated into over thirty languages worldwide, and at least the American English version is credited as being translated by Harari, with help from John Purcell and Haim Watzman. Why did Sapiens:… make such a splash around the world? It tells a fascinating story. Harari is an Israeli born historian and a tenured history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a passion for how every human endeavor affects history and the world.

Harari begins his tale with a prologue containing the following historical, broad-stroke timeline to frame his story. The timeline appears in Sapiens: … under the heading, “Timeline of History” (included here for reference and because it’s rather interesting):

Harari’s timeline provides the framework and compressed timeframe reference for the book that tells the story of the progress of Homo sapiens driven largely by three major revolutions:

The Cognitive Revolution
The Agricultural Revolution
The Scientific Revolution

He recognizes the importance of the Industrial Revolution as well, but he asserts that was more of a steady state condition, expanding The Scientific Revolution and humankind’s scientific progress rather than creating another specific metamorphosis. Harari points out that it did greatly increase Sapiens’ destructive power. Compared to many history textbooks that are rife with names and dates, Harari’s approach is broader. His time references are more in terms of ranges and time either before the present, or in the future in his last couple of chapters as he looks ahead to where humankind might be headed.

Some of Harari’s use of terms in his timeline differ from those that might readily come to mind. One obvious example is his use of the term intelligent design. For many readers the concept that comes to mind when they see that term is religious in nature, not a science reference. Harari’s use of that term in the context provided is specific to our modern day advances in genetic engineering rather than in reference to Creation Theory.

Harari writes from a historical perspective, and employs results and theories from science to amplify his narrative. His notes section in the back of the book serves as a chapter by chapter bibliography providing a wealth of scientific and historical references for his assertions. He also provides a clear and reasonably comprehensive index to allow readers to quickly find particular topics of interest.

Although the book is written as a history textbook, the prose is gripping, and it can be read in novel fashion as well. It keeps a reader’s interest telling a story that is at once riveting and certainly relevant across age, educational, and regional boundaries.

After the timeline, the text of the book is written in four parts including the three major revolutions along with a part discussing the unification of our species before the Scientific Revolution. Each part is several chapters long, pulling from the timeline as the story builds. Although Harari occasionally jumps forward with an example of how some past occurrence is reflected in modern times, the overall flow is logical and very easy to follow. He also sometimes uses a bit of hyperbole or humor to make a point. At times, this serves to make some of his more complex science or cultural references a bit more accessible to a wider audience. In those cases, some purists might potentially take offense.

Throughout the course of his chronicle, Harari presents multiple, often contradictory, theories surrounding various events, particularly in cases where no definitive answer has yet been determined. At times, while no one theory completely explains a given historical phenomenon, Harari poses an interesting combination of explanations allowing the aggregation of various theories to come close.

Today, a discussion of biological classification can be found in any high school or college biology textbook. The names are Latin, but they are neither pompous nor capricious. They are based on specific criteria at each level of classification facilitating clarity to help scientists in understanding the biological world. Harari is very aware of the science surrounding the historical record, even if he occasionally makes light of it or is a bit loose with some of the specifics.

Sapiens:… is a history textbook, not a biology textbook, so with respect to the biological classification, Harari doesn’t refer to the entire taxonomy. He instead refers to only the parts immediately pertinent to his narrative. In that context, he colloquially references the family of great apes (family – Hominidae ), and he refers to humans (or humankind) as generic way to identify any species under the genus Homo ; whereas, his use of the term Sapiens as a proper noun refers specifically to Homo sapiens , as opposed to Homo neanderthalensis , Homo erectus , or any of our other sister species. Based on scientific evidence, he further states that at one point in history there were at least six different species of humans, and our current exclusivity is both peculiar and portentous.

As a side note, for the purposes of reflecting consistency between the discussion in this review and the prose in Harari’s text, I employ the following conventions:

Homo sapiens refers to the specific species.
Sapiens: … is used as a shortcut to refer to the title of the book since the full title, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , was defined in the first paragraph and would be rather cumbersome to keep restating in full.
Sapiens (not italicized) is used as a proper noun to reference the species Homo sapiens in the same way that the proper noun Neandertathals refers to the species Homo neanderthalensis .

As an example of how Harari often discusses competing theories of a given event or artifact, he briefly presents two opposing theories (Interbreeding Theory and Replacement Theory) of how Sapiens became the solo human species (at least for the present).

Harari, not being afraid of potential controversy, forges ahead to first argue the merits of the Replacement Theory using Sapiens’ legendary, and historically documented, intolerance. In support of this thesis, Harari points to the weight that modern members of our species put on even small differences such as skin color, language, or religion often being the motivation behind innumerable horrors. Given that propensity, Harari suggests that it’s unlikely that ancient Sapiens would have been more tolerant toward other human species. Instead, he suggests, per the Replacement Theory, that it’s far more likely that Sapiens saw them as a threat.

He then reverses course and citing recent advances in the Human Genome Project, concedes that the Interbreeding Theory would apply. He ends his discussion conceding that the full answer probably lies with some combination of the two theories, even though on the surface, they seem to be mutually exclusive.

There has been a great deal of speculation through the ages about what makes Sapiens such a dominant force in the Animal Kingdom, and Harari makes a strong case for the Cognitive Revolution being the crucial start of Sapiens moving from the middle of the pack to the top. He maintains that the key distinguishing Sapiens development was its use of fictive language. He points out that there are numerous tool makers in the animal kingdom, as well as many other species with opposable thumbs, but he asserts that none of the others have demonstrated the ability to imagine.

The historical record suggests that the Cognitive Revolution was also the start of the Sapiens spread from Africa. Harari points out, somewhat heavy handedly, that wherever Sapiens went, the ecology changed, and some number of other species ceased to exist. He supports his conjecture with fossil evidence from Australia where the appearance of Sapiens caused the megafauna to die off in short order. Here he employs a bit of poetic license to suggest a colorful sequence of events that fits the data, but whether it happened the way he suggests or some other way, it’s pretty clear that Sapiens certainly had a part in that ecological change.

One fascinating concept that Harari describes in detail is that of a common myth, which of course is predicated on the Sapiens ability to conceptualize and to fictionalize. In the modern world, there are innumerable common myths to which we ascribe. National boundaries are common myths. Corporations and governments are common myths. Religions are common myths. These constructs are imaginary in nature, but societies (or subsets thereof) collectively accept them as real, and it’s this type of cognitive acceptance that allows large numbers of outright strangers to cooperate.

Harari’s contention is that the second major metamorphosis that shaped Sapiens history was the Agricultural Revolution that occurred about 12,000 years ago. Prior to that point, Sapiens relied on hunting and gathering to sustain themselves, without taking any definitive actions to alter the course of nature to shape its available banquet. On the surface, domestication of a small set of plants and animals seems like a leap forward. Harari contends that in many ways, the advent of farming made the average Sapiens’ life more difficult, and forced them to work harder. As Harari shows throughout the book, he welcomes controversy. While describing the events that transpired surrounding the Agricultural Revolution, he again steps forcefully into another debate – suggesting that Sapiens didn’t actually domesticate the plants. Instead, a small number of plants (e.g., wheat, rice, potatoes) domesticated Sapiens.

Harari goes on to describe in some detail various facets of this revolution and its effects on the history of humankind. The net, in his view, is that the Agricultural Revolution afforded Sapiens an evolutionary advantage. From that perspective, the only thing that matters is that the number of members of a given species is maximized, or in biological terms, the number of copies of their DNA increases. The Agricultural Revolution, bringing with it permanent settlements, money, religion, increased violence and disease within their settlements, and worse conditions (quality of life) for the vast majority of individuals, still allowed them to increase their overall population faster, and as such, allowed Sapiens to become more evolutionarily successful.

According to Harari’s narrative, the fate of the animals that Sapiens domesticated through the Agricultural Revolution ranged from being pampered to persecuted. A specific animal’s lot in life hinged on whether they were raised to play, to work, or as food. Portions of that part of the story are rather grisly, but they are entirely plausible, as well as observable in modern society.

The effects of the Agricultural Revolution are shown to be far reaching, and Harari continues with a discussion surrounding the ebb and flow of civilizations growing out of Sapiens’ new found stability. He illustrates how the spread of imperial rule, the development of the written word, commerce, and religion bring about even greater spans of influence and control than were possible before.

Harari’s discussion of religion again plunges the story headlong into controversy. He first describes the rise of polytheism as somewhat innocuous. His interpretation of the cultural evidence is that there were numerous polytheistic beliefs that tended to be regional. Each population assumed their pantheon of gods applied only to them, and as such, there was no reason or benefit in attempting to force neighboring populations to either acknowledge or submit to them. He acknowledges that there were some exceptions, but overall, he contends that this tended to be the case. He then illustrates that as missionary monotheistic beliefs began to take hold, the story changed.

With the rise of missionary monotheism, Harari claims there was a commensurate rise in religious wars, and history is rife with examples of religious persecution. He segregates missionary monotheistic beliefs from non-missionary practices like Judaism because he claims that if proselytizing isn’t part of the culture, there’s no imperial benefit.

While the book’s discussion of religion provides a glaring example, and religion’s influence on Sapiens is later revisited in a chapter entitled “The Law of Religion,” there are other examples of just how unjust history can be. Harari includes a chapter entitled “There is No Justice in History” to explore various facets of life being unfair throughout humankind’s development following the Agricultural Revolution. There are ample examples to fuel his discussion, but he boils it down to a simple concept that grew out of the Cognitive Revolution – “humans created imagined orders and devised scripts.” In other words, they made up imaginary rules and hierarchies to cover the gaps where biology and instinct fell short.

Among the hierarchies, the gender divide is one that is particularly touchy, and Harari provides an interesting look at potential reasons why, since the Agricultural Revolution, most Sapiens societies tend to be patriarchal, and how this is ostensibly to Sapiens’ detriment. He asserts that women are inherently more cooperative than men, and as a species, Sapiens need to cooperate in order to survive, so a patriarchal structure would be suboptimal. The potential justifications he explores include: muscle power, aggression, and patriarchal genes. He doesn’t answer the question, but he poses some interesting material to contemplate.

After a thorough look at the effects of the Agricultural Revolution, Harari then explores how humankind unified over time. This bridges a number of events leading through ever larger civilizations, and shows the means to cooperation and conflict on an even larger scale.

Harari then explores the next major metamorphosis which came through the Scientific Revolution. In the course of human history, this was relatively recent, beginning only about 500 years ago. Although humankind has sought to understand the universe in which it lives since the Cognitive Revolution, the big change that sparked the Scientific Revolution was that Sapiens as a species was finally able to admit its ignorance. Harari’s story goes on to point out some details of the scientific method, articulate the importance of mathematics and observation, and most importantly, supports the idea that a key result of the Scientific Revolution was to open human cultures to view progress as an ideal to work toward.

One interesting point that comes out in Harari’s text is that exploration and conquest were instrumental in furthering the pursuit of scientific knowledge. In fact, Harari conjectures that if not for the audacity of the European explorers, the Scientific Revolution might not have occurred.

After a lengthy discussion of numerous contributing events, Harari then explores how the Scientific Revolution made the Industrial Revolution possible. He doesn’t claim that the Industrial Revolution is another key historical branch, more that it is the steady state extension made possible by the Scientific Revolution. He notes that in modern times, while Sapiens have shown a remarkable, and an almost unlimited capacity to mold nature to their needs, they have become subject to the whims of industry and government.

Harari presents a detailed discussion of possible causes, impacts, and realities of modern life including whether all of Sapiens’ achievements make them happier now than they were much earlier in their development (something which clearly cannot be formally ascertained). Based on what has come before, Harari ends his narrative speculating on a number of potential futures humankind might experience, some enchanting, some predicting its demise. One interesting point is that Harari contends that it is possible, through the course of evolution, that Sapiens may not always be the only human species. Multiple members of the genus Homo once existed, and though the same ones might not reappear, he suggests there is the potential that new ones could eventually assert themselves, or Sapiens could even invent them through techniques that are currently the fodder of science fiction.

Even if a reader discounts many of Harari’s assertions, the story he weaves is a fascinating and compelling read. The book is also refreshing in offering several theories of how this history unfolded. Harari doesn’t claim to have all the answers, only the insight to put the events together into a coherent story, and to ask the questions that he and others have pondered.

References: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , Harper, by Yuval Noah Harari Summary: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Also by Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow , Harper, by Yuval Noah Harari

Science » Popular Science

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

By yuval noah harari.

Some academic historians have been quite critical of Sapiens by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, pointing out that some of the nuances of debates are lost in a popular history book . But that’s also why it makes a good read and an effective audiobook. It not only gives Harari more scope to address the big questions, but also gives many people their first detailed introduction to the origins of human beings. There’s a lot to think about after reading this book, even if you ultimately disagree with his interpretation.

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Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever

By Ian Parker

In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “ Sapiens ,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.

“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, has spent the years since the publication of “Sapiens” in conversations about this cliffhanger. His two subsequent best-sellers—“ Homo Deus ” (2017) and “ 21 Lessons for the 21st Century ” (2018)—focus on the present and the near future. Harari now defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. He dwells particularly on the possibility that biometric monitoring, coupled with advanced computing, will give corporations and governments access to more complete data about people—about their desires and liabilities—than people have about themselves. A life under such scrutiny, he said recently, is liable to become “one long, stressing job interview.”

If Harari weren’t always out in public, one might mistake him for a recluse. He is shyly oracular. He spends part of almost every appearance denying that he is a guru. But, when speaking at conferences where C.E.O.s meet public intellectuals, or visiting Mark Zuckerberg ’s Palo Alto house, or the Élysée Palace, in Paris, he’ll put a long finger to his chin and quietly answer questions about Neanderthals, self-driving cars, and the series finale of “Game of Thrones.” Harari’s publishing and speaking interests now occupy a staff of twelve, who work out of a sunny office in Tel Aviv, where an employee from Peru cooks everyone vegan lunches. Here, one can learn details of a scheduled graphic novel of “Sapiens”—a cartoon version of Harari, wearing wire-framed glasses and looking a little balder than in life, pops up here and there, across time and space. There are also plans for a “Sapiens” children’s book, and a multi-season “Sapiens”-inspired TV drama, covering sixty thousand years, with a script by the co-writer of Mel Gibson’s “ Apocalypto .”

Harari seldom goes to this office. He works at the home he shares with Itzik Yahav, his husband, who is also his agent and manager. They live in a village of expensive modern houses, half an hour inland from Tel Aviv, at a spot where Israel’s coastal plain is first interrupted by hills. The location gives a view of half the country and, hazily, the Mediterranean beyond. Below the house are the ruins of the once mighty Canaanite city of Gezer; Harari and Yahav walk their dog there. Their swimming pool is blob-shaped and, at night, lit a vivid mauve.

At lunchtime one day in September, Yahav drove me to the house from Tel Aviv, in a Porsche S.U.V. with a rainbow-flag sticker on its windshield. “Yuval’s unhappy with my choice of car,” Yahav said, laughing. “He thinks it’s unacceptable that a historian should have money.” While Yahav drove, he had a few conversations with colleagues, on speakerphone, about the fittings for a new Harari headquarters, in a brutalist tower block above the Dizengoff Center mall. He said, “I can’t tell you how much I need a P.A.”—a personal assistant—“but I’m not an easy person.” Asked to consider his husband’s current place in world affairs, Yahav estimated that Harari was “between Madonna and Steven Pinker .”

Harari and Yahav, both in their mid-forties, grew up near each other, but unknown to each other, in Kiryat Ata, an industrial town outside Haifa. (Yahav jokingly called it “the Israeli Chernobyl.”) Yahav’s background is less solidly middle class than his husband’s. When the two men met, nearly twenty years ago, Harari had just finished his graduate studies, and Yahav teased him: “You’ve never worked? You’ve never had to pick up a plate for your living? I was a waiter from age fifteen!” He thought of Harari as a “genius geek.” Yahav, who was then a producer in nonprofit theatre, is now known for making bold, and sometimes outlandish, demands on behalf of his husband. “Because I have only one author, I can go crazy,” he had told me. In the car, he noted that he had declined an invitation to have Harari participate in the World Economic Forum, at Davos, in 2017, because the proposed panels were “not good enough.” A year later, when Harari was offered the main stage, in a slot between Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron , Yahav accepted. His recollections of such negotiations are delivered with self-mocking charm and a low, conspiratorial laugh. He likes to say, “You don’t understand—Yuval works for me! ”

We left the highway and drove into the village. He said of Harari, “When I meet my friends, he’s usually not invited, because my friends are crazy and loud. It’s too much for him. He shuts down.” When planning receptions and dinners for Harari, Yahav follows a firm rule: “Not more than eight people.”

For more than a decade, Harari has spent several weeks each year on a silent-meditation retreat, usually in India. At home, he starts his day with an hour of meditation; in the summer, he also swims for half an hour while listening to nonfiction audiobooks aimed at the general reader. (Around the time of my visit, he was listening to a history of the Cuban Revolution, and to a study of the culture of software engineering.) He swims the breaststroke, wearing a mask, a snorkel, and “bone conduction” headphones that press against his temples, bypassing the ears.

When Yahav and I arrived at the house, Harari was working at the kitchen table, reading news stories from Ukraine, printed for him by an assistant. He had an upcoming speaking engagement in Kyiv, at an oligarch-funded conference. He was also planning a visit to the United Arab Emirates, which required some delicacy—the country has no diplomatic ties with Israel.

The house was open and airy, and featured a piano. (Yahav plays.) Harari was wearing shorts and Velcro-fastened sandals, and, as Yahav fondly observed, his swimming headphones had left imprints on his head. Harari explained to me that the device “beams sound into the skull.” Later, with my encouragement, he put on his cyborgian getup, including the snorkel, and laughed as I took a photograph, saying, “Just don’t put that in the paper, because Itzik will kill both me and you.”

Unusually for a public intellectual, Harari has drawn up a mission statement. It’s pinned on a bulletin board in the Tel Aviv office, and begins, “Keep your eyes on the ball. Focus on the main global problems facing humanity.” It also says, “Learn to distinguish reality from illusion,” and “Care about suffering.” The statement used to include “Embrace ambiguity.” This was cut, according to one of Harari’s colleagues, because it was too ambiguous.

One recent afternoon, Naama Avital, the operation’s C.E.O., and Naama Wartenburg, Harari’s chief marketing officer, were sitting with Yahav, wondering if Harari would accept a hypothetical invitation to appear on a panel with President Donald Trump.

“I think that whenever Yuval is free to say exactly what he thinks, then it’s O.K.,” Avital said.

Yahav, surprised, said that he could perhaps imagine a private meeting, “but to film it—to film Yuval with Trump?”

A knight slays a dragon outside a princess's window.

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“You’d have a captive audience,” Wartenburg said.

Avital agreed, noting, “There’s a politician, but then there are his supporters—and you’re talking about tens of millions of people.”

“A panel with Trump ?” Yahav asked. He later said that he had never accepted any speaking invitations from Israeli settlers in the West Bank, adding that Harari, although not a supporter of settlements, might have been inclined to say yes.

Harari has acquired a large audience in a short time, and—like the Silicon Valley leaders who admire his work—he can seem uncertain about what to do with his influence. Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian translation of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” had been edited to make it more palatable to Vladimir Putin’s government. Harari had approved some of these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its 2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by President Trump.

Harari’s office is still largely a boutique agency serving the writing and speaking interests of one client. But, last fall, it began to brand part of its work under the heading of “Sapienship.” The office remains a for-profit enterprise, but it has taken on some of the ambitions and attributes of a think tank, or the foundation of a high-minded industrialist. Sapienship’s activities are driven by what Harari’s colleagues call his “vision.” Avital explained that some projects she was working on, such as “Sapiens”-related school workshops, didn’t rely on “everyday contact with Yuval.”

Harari’s vision takes the form of a list. “That’s something I have from students,” he told me. “They like short lists.” His proposition, often repeated, is that humanity faces three primary threats: nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption. Other issues that politicians commonly talk about—terrorism, migration, inequality, poverty—are lesser worries, if not distractions. In part because there’s little disagreement, at least in a Harari audience, about the seriousness of the nuclear and climate threats, and about how to respond to them, Harari highlights the technological one. Last September, while appearing onstage with Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s President, at an “influencers’ summit” in Tel Aviv, Harari said, in Hebrew, “Think about a situation where somebody in Beijing or San Francisco knows what every citizen in Israel is doing at every moment—all the most intimate details about every mayor, member of the Knesset, and officer in the Army, from the age of zero.” He added, “Those who will control the world in the twenty-first century are those who will control data.”

He also said that Homo sapiens would likely disappear, in a tech-driven upgrade. Harari often disputes the notion that he makes prophecies or predictions—indeed, he has claimed to do “the opposite”—but a prediction acknowledging uncertainty is still a prediction. Talking to Rivlin, Harari said, “In two hundred years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens —there will be something else.”

“What a world,” Rivlin said. The event ended in a hug.

Afterward, Harari said of Rivlin, “He took my message to be kind of pessimistic.” Although the two men had largely spoken past each other, they were in some ways aligned. An Israeli President is a national figurehead, standing above the political fray. Harari claims a similar space. He speaks of looming mayhem but makes no proposals beyond urging international coöperation, and “focus.” A parody of Harari’s writing, in the British magazine Private Eye , included streams of questions: “What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? If you are in a falling lift, will it do any good to jump up and down like crazy? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? What is the state capital of Wyoming?”

This tentativeness at first seems odd. Harari has the ear of decision-makers; he travels the world to show them PowerPoint slides depicting mountains of trash and unemployed hordes. But, like a fiery street preacher unable to recommend one faith over another, he concludes with a policy shrug. Harari emphasizes that the public should press politicians to respond to tech threats, but when I asked what that response should be he said, “I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think it will come from me. Even if I took three years off, and just immersed myself in some cave of books and meditation, I don’t think I would emerge with the answer.”

Harari’s reluctance to support particular political actions can be understood, in part, as instinctual conservatism and brand protection. According to “Sapiens,” progress is basically an illusion; the Agricultural Revolution was “history’s biggest fraud,” and liberal humanism is a religion no more founded on reality than any other. Harari writes, “The Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.” In such a context, any specific policy idea is likely to seem paltry, and certainly too quotidian for a keynote speech. A policy might also turn out to be a mistake. “We are very careful, the entire team, about endorsing anything, any petition,” Harari told me.

Harari has given talks at Google and Instagram. Last spring, on a visit to California, he had dinner with, among others, Jack Dorsey , Twitter’s co-founder and C.E.O., and Chris Cox, the former chief product officer at Facebook. It’s not hard to understand Harari’s appeal to Silicon Valley executives, who would prefer to cast a furrowed gaze toward the distant future than to rewrite their privacy policies or their algorithms. (Zuckerberg rarely responds to questions about the malign influence of Facebook without speaking of his “focus” on this or that.) Harari said of tech entrepreneurs, “I don’t try intentionally to be a threat to them. I think that much of what they’re doing is also good. I think there are many things to be said for working with them as long as it’s possible, instead of viewing them as the enemy.” Harari believes that some of the social ills caused by a company like Facebook should be understood as bugs—“and, as good engineers, they are trying to fix the bugs.” Earlier, Itzik Yahav had said that he felt no unease about “visiting Mark Zuckerberg at his home, with Priscilla, and Beast, the dog,” adding, “I don’t think Mark is an evil person. And Yuval is bringing questions.”

Harari’s policy agnosticism is also connected to his focus on focus itself. The aspect of a technological dystopia that most preoccupies him—losing mental autonomy to A.I.—can be at least partly countered, in his view, by citizens cultivating greater mindfulness. He collects examples of A.I. threats. He refers, for instance, to recent research suggesting that it’s possible to measure people’s blood pressure by processing video of their faces. A government that can see your blood boiling during a leader’s speech can identify you as a dissident. Similarly, Harari has observed that, had sophisticated artificial intelligence existed when he was younger, it might have recognized his homosexuality long before he was ready to acknowledge it. Such data-driven judgments don’t need to be perfectly accurate to outperform humans. Harari argues that, though there’s no sure prophylactic against such future intrusions, people who are alert to the workings of their minds will be better able to protect themselves. Harari recently told a Ukrainian reporter, “Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you.” In this context, to think clearly—to snorkel in the pool, back and forth—is a form of social action.

Naama Avital, in the Tel Aviv office, told me that, on social media, fans of Harari’s books tend to be “largely male, twenty-five to thirty-five.” Bill Gates is a Harari enthusiast, but the more typical reader may be a young person grateful for permission to pay more attention to his or her needs than to the needs of others. (Not long ago, one of Harari’s YouTube admirers commented, “Your books changed my life, Yuval. Just as investing in Tesla did.”)

Harari doesn’t dismiss more active forms of political engagement, particularly in the realm of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but his writing underscores the importance of equanimity. In a section of “Sapiens” titled “Know Thyself,” Harari describes how the serenity achieved through meditation can be “so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.” “21 Lessons” includes extended commentary on the life of the Buddha, who “taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying.” Harari continues, “You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind, but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you. . . . ‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises, ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ ”

Harari didn’t learn the result of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election until five weeks after the vote. He was on a retreat, in England. In Vipassana meditation, the form that Harari practices, a retreat lasts at least ten days. He sometimes does ten-day retreats in Israel, in the role of a teaching assistant. Once a year, he goes away for a month or longer. Participants at a Vipassana center may talk to one another as they arrive—while giving up their phones and books—but thereafter they’re expected to be silent, even while eating with others.

I discussed meditation with Harari one day at a restaurant in a Tel Aviv hotel. (A young doorman recognized him and thanked him for his writing.) We were joined by Itzik Yahav and the mothers of both men. Jeanette Yahav, an accountant, has sometimes worked in the Tel Aviv office. So, too, has Pnina Harari, a former office administrator; she has had the task of responding to the e-mail pouring into Harari’s Web site: poems, pieces of music, arguments for the existence of God.

Harari said of the India retreats, which take place northeast of Mumbai, “Most of the day you’re in your own cell, the size of this table.”

“Unbelievable,” Pnina Harari said.

During her son’s absences, she and Yahav stay in touch. “We speak, we console each other,” she said. She also starts a journal: “It’s like a letter to Yuval. And the last day of the meditation I send it to him.” Once back in Mumbai, he can open an e-mail containing two months of his mother’s news.

Before Itzik Yahav met Harari, through a dating site, he had some experience of Vipassana, and for years they practiced together. Yahav has now stopped. “I couldn’t keep up,” he told me. “And you’re not allowed to drink. I want to drink with friends, a glass of wine.” I later spoke to Yoram Yovell, a friend of Harari’s, who is a well-known Israeli neuroscientist and TV host. A few years ago, Yovell signed up for a ten-day retreat in India. He recalled telling himself, “This is the first time in ten years that you’re having a ten-day vacation, and you’re spending it sitting on your tush, on this little mat, inhaling and exhaling. And outside is India! ” He lasted twenty-four hours. (In 2018, two years after authorities in Myanmar began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims, Jack Dorsey completed a ten-day Vipassana retreat in that country, and defended his visit by saying, “This was a purely personal trip for me focused on only one dimension: meditation.”)

At lunch, Pnina Harari recalled the moment when Yuval’s two older sisters reported to her that Yuval had taught himself to read: “He was three, not more than four.”

Yuval smiled. “I think more like four, five.”

She described the time he wrote a school essay, then rewrote it to make it less sophisticated. He told her that nobody would have understood the first draft.

From the age of eight, Harari attended a school for bright students, two bus rides away from his family’s house in Kiryat Ata. Yuval’s father, who died in 2010, was born on a kibbutz, and maintained a life-long skepticism about socialism; his work, as a state-employed armaments engineer, was classified. By the standards of the town, the Harari household was bourgeois and bookish.

The young Yuval had a taste for grand designs. He has said, “I promised myself that when I grew up I would not get bogged down in the mundane troubles of daily life, but would do my best to understand the big picture.” In the back yard, he spent months digging a very deep hole; it was never filled in, and sometimes became a pond. He built, out of wood blocks and Formica tiles, a huge map of Europe, on which he played war games of his own invention. Harari told me that during his adolescence, against the backdrop of the first intifada, he went through a period when he was “a kind of stereotypical right-wing nationalist.” He recalled his mind-set: “Israel as a nation is the most important thing in the world. And, obviously, we are right about everything. And the whole world doesn’t understand us and hates us. So we have to be strong and defend ourselves.” He laughed. “You know—the usual stuff.”

He deferred his compulsory military service, through a program for high-achieving students. (The service was never completed, because of an undisclosed health problem. “It wasn’t something catastrophic,” he said. “I’m still here.”) When he began college, at Hebrew University, he was younger than his peers, and he had not shared the experience of three years of activity often involving groups larger than eight. By then, Harari’s nationalist fire had dimmed. In its place, he had attempted to will himself into religious conviction—and an observant Jewish life. “I was very keen to believe,” he said. He supposed, wrongly, that “if I read enough, or think about it enough, or talk to the right people, then something will click.”

In Chapter 2 of “Sapiens,” Harari describes how, about seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens began to develop nuanced language, and thereby began to dominate other Homo species, and the world. Harari’s discussion reflects standard scholarly arguments, but he adds this gloss: during what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens became uniquely able to communicate untruths. “As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled,” he writes, referring to myths and gods. “Many animals and human species could previously say ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ ” This mental leap enabled coöperation among strangers: “Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.”

A dog owner and her friend look at her dog which is wailing in despair.

In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations. Harari uses “fiction” where another might say “social construct.” (He explained to me, “I would almost always go for the day-to-day word, even if the nuance of the professional word is a bit more accurate.”) Harari further proposes that fictions require believers , and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists. Every social construct, then, is a kind of religion: a declaration of universal human rights is not a manifesto, or a program, but the expression of a benign delusion; an activity like using money, or obeying a stoplight, is a collective fantasy, not a ritual. When I asked him if he really meant this, he laughed, and said, “It’s like the weak force in physics—which is weak, but still strong enough to hold the entire universe together!” (In fact, the weak force is responsible for the disintegration of subatomic particles.) “It’s the same with these fictions—they are strong enough to hold millions of people together.”

In his representation of how people function in society, Harari sometimes seems to be extrapolating from his personal history—from his eagerness to believe in something. When I called him a “seeker,” he gave amused, half-grudging assent.

As an undergraduate, Harari wrote a paper, for a medieval-history class, that was later published, precociously, in a peer-reviewed journal. “ The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment ” challenged the previously held assumption that, in crusader armies, most cavalrymen were heavily armored. Harari proposed, in an argument derived from careful reading of sources across several centuries, that many were light cavalrymen. Benjamin Kedar, who taught the class, told me that the paper “was absolutely original, and really a breakthrough.” It seems to be generally agreed that, had Harari stuck solely to military history of this era, he would have become a significant figure in the field. Idan Sherer, a former student and research assistant of Harari’s who now teaches at Ben Gurion University, said, “I don’t think the prominent scholar, but definitely one of them.”

In academic prose, especially philosophy, Harari seems to have found something analogous to what he had sought in nation and in faith. “I had respect for, and belief in, very dense writing,” he recalled. “One of the first things I did when I came out, to myself, as gay—I went to the university library and took out all these books about queer theory, which were some of the densest things I’ve ever read.” He jokingly added, “It almost converted me back. It was ‘O.K., now you’re gay, so you need to be very serious about it.’ ”

In 1998, he began working toward a doctorate in history, at the University of Oxford. “He was oppressed by the grayness,” Harari’s mother recalled, at lunch. Harari agreed: “It wasn’t the greatest time of my life. It was a culture shock, it was a climate shock. I just couldn’t grasp it could be weeks and weeks and you never see the sun.” He later added, “It was a personal impasse. I’d hoped that, by studying and researching, I would understand not only the world but my life.” He went on, “All the books I’d been reading and all the philosophical discussions—not only did they not provide an answer, it seemed extremely unlikely that any answer would ever come out of this.” He told himself, “There is something fundamentally wrong in the way that I’m approaching this whole thing.”

One reason he chose to study outside Israel was to “start life anew,” as a gay man. On weekends, he went to London night clubs. (“I think I tried Ecstasy a few times,” he said.) And he made dates online. He set himself the target of having sex with at least one new partner a week, “to make up for lost time, and also understand how it works—because I was very shy.” He laughed. “Very strong discipline!” He treated each encounter as a credit in a ledger, “so if one week I had two, and then the next week there was none, I’m O.K.”

These recollections contain no regret, but, Harari said, “coming out was a kind of false enlightenment.” He explained, “I’d had this feeling— this is it . There was one big piece of the puzzle that I was missing, and this is why my life was completely fucked up.” Instead, he felt “even more miserable.”

On a dating site, Harari met Ron Merom, an Israeli software engineer. As Merom recently recalled, they began an intense e-mail correspondence “about the meaning of life, and all that.” They became friends. (In 2015, when “Sapiens” was first published in English, Merom was working for Google in California, and helped arrange for Harari to give an “Authors at Google” talk, which was posted online—an important early moment of exposure.) Merom, who now works at Facebook, has forgotten the details of their youthful exchanges, but can recall their flavor: Harari’s personal philosophy at the time was complex and dark, “even a bit violent or aggressive”—and this included his discussion of sexual relationships. As Merom put it, “It was ‘I need to conquer the world—either you win or you lose.’ ”

Merom had just begun going on meditation retreats. He told Harari, “It sounds like you’re looking for something, and Vipassana might be it.” In 2000, when Harari was midway through his thesis—a study of how Renaissance military memoirists described their experiences of war—he took a bus to a meditation center in the West of England.

Ten days later, Harari wrote to Amir Fink, a friend in Israel. Fink, who now works as an environmentalist, told me that Harari had quoted, giddily, the theme song of a “Pinocchio” TV show once beloved in Israel: “Good morning, world! I’m now freed from my strings. I’m a real boy.”

At the retreat, Harari was told that he should do nothing but notice his breath, in and out, and notice whenever his mind wandered. This, Harari has written, “was the most important thing anybody had ever told me.”

Steven Gunn, an Oxford historian and Harari’s doctoral adviser, recently recalled the moment: “I sort of did my best supervisorial thing. ‘Are you sure you’re not getting mixed up in a cult?’ So far as I could tell, he wasn’t being drawn into anything he didn’t want to be drawn into.”

On a drive with Yahav and Harari from their home to Jerusalem, I asked if it was fair to think of “Sapiens” as an attempt to transmit Buddhist principles, not just through its references to meditation—and to the possibility of finding serenity in self-knowledge—but through its narrative shape. The story of “Sapiens” echoes the Buddha’s “basic realities”: constant change; no enduring essence; the inevitability of suffering.

“Yes, to some extent,” Harari said. “It’s definitely not a conscious project. It’s not ‘O.K.! Now I believe in these three principles, and now I need to convince the world, but I can’t state it directly, because this would be a missionary thing.’ ” Rather, he said, the experience of meditation “imbues your entire thinking.”

He added, “I definitely don’t think that the solution to all the world’s problems is to convert everybody to Buddhism, or to have everybody meditating. I meditate, I know how difficult it is. There’s no chance you can get eight billion people to meditate, and, even if they try, in many cases it could backfire in a terrible way. It’s very easy to become self-absorbed, to become megalomaniacal.” He referred to Ashin Wirathu, an ultranationalist Buddhist monk in Myanmar, who has incited violence against Rohingya Muslims.

In “Sapiens,” Harari went on, part of the task had been “to show how everything is impermanent, and what we think of as eternal social structures—even family, money, religion, nations—everything is changing, nothing is eternal, everything came out of some historical process.” These were Buddhist thoughts, he said, but they were easy enough to access without Buddhism. “Maybe biology is permanent, but in society nothing is permanent,” he said. “There’s no essence, no essence to any nation. You don’t need to meditate for two hours a day to realize that.”

We drove to Hebrew University, which is atop Mt. Scopus. We walked into the humanities building, and, through an emergency exit, onto a rooftop. There was a panoramic view of the Old City and the Temple Mount. Harari recalled his return to the university, from Oxford, in 2001, during the second intifada. The university is surrounded by Arab neighborhoods that he’s never visited. In the car, he had been talking about current conditions in Israel; in recent years, he had said, “many, if not most, Israelis simply lost the motivation to solve the conflict, especially because Israel has managed to control it so efficiently.” Harari told me that, as a historian, he had to dispute the assumption that an occupation can’t last “for decades, for centuries”—it can, and new surveillance technologies can enable oppression “with almost no killing.” Harari saw no alternative other than “to wait for history to work its magic—a war, a catastrophe.” With a dry laugh, he said, “Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran—a couple of thousand people die, something . This can break the mental deadlock.”

Harari recalled a moment, in 2015, when he and Yahav had accidentally violated the eight-person rule. They had gone to a dinner that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to attend. Netanyahu was known to have read “Sapiens.” “We were told it would be very intimate,” Harari said. There were forty guests. Harari shared a few pleasantries with Netanyahu, but they had “no real exchange at all.”

Yahav interjected to suggest that, because of “Sapiens,” Netanyahu “started doing Meatless Monday.” Harari, who, like Yahav, largely avoids eating animal products, writes in “Sapiens” that “modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.” When Netanyahu announced a commitment “to fight cruelty toward animals,” friends encouraged Harari to take a little credit.

“People told me this was my greatest achievement,” Harari said. “I managed to convince Netanyahu of something! It didn’t matter what.” This assessment gives some indication of Harari’s local politics, but Yoram Yovell, his TV-presenter friend, said that he had tried and failed to persuade Harari to speak against Netanyahu publicly. Yovell said that Harari, although “vehemently against Netanyahu,” seemed to resist “jumping into the essence of life—the blood and guts of life,” adding, “I actually am disappointed with it.” Harari, who has declined invitations to write a regular column in the Israeli press, told me, “I could start making speeches, and writing, ‘Vote for this party,’ and maybe, one time, I can convince a couple of thousand people to change their vote. But then I will kind of expend my entire credit on this. I’ll be identified with one party, one camp.” He did acknowledge that he was discouraged by the choice presented by the September general election , which was then imminent: “It’s either a right-wing government or an extreme-right-wing government. There is no other serious option.”

At Hebrew University, his role is somewhat rarefied: he has negotiated his way to having no faculty responsibilities beyond teaching; he currently advises no Ph.D. students. (He said of his professional life, “I write the books and give talks. Itzik is doing basically everything else.”) Harari teaches one semester a year, fitting three classes into one day a week. His recent courses include a history of relations between humans and animals—the subject of a future Harari book, perhaps—and another called History for the Masses, on writing for a general reader. During our visit to the university, he took me to an empty lecture hall with steeply raked seating. “This is where ‘Sapiens’ originated,” he said. He noted, with mock affront, that the room attracts stray cats: “They come into class, and they grab all the attention. ‘A cat! Oh!’ ”

“It’s hard to keep a good friendship when someone’s financial status changes,” Amir Fink told me. Fink and his husband, a musicologist, have known Harari since college. “We have tried to keep his success out of it. As two couples, we meet a lot, we take vacations abroad together.” (Neither couple has children.) Fink went on, “We love to come to their place for the weekend.” They play board games, such as Settlers of Catan, and “whist—Israeli Army whist.”

Fink spoke of the scale of the operation built by Harari and Yahav. “I hope it’s sustainable,” he said. With “Sapiens,” he went on, Harari had written “a book that summarizes the world.” The books that followed were bound to be “more specific, and more political.” That is, they drew Harari away from his natural intellectual territory. “Homo Deus” derived directly from Harari’s teaching, but “21 Lessons,” Fink said, “is basically a collection of articles and responses to the present day.” He added, “It’s very hard for Yuval to keep himself as a teacher,” noting, “He becomes, I guess, what the French would call a philosophe .”

While Harari was at Oxford, he read Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, “ Guns, Germs, and Steel ,” and was dazzled by its reach, across time and place. “It was a complete life-changer,” Harari said. “You could actually write such books!” Steven Gunn, Harari’s Oxford adviser, told me that, as Harari worked on his thesis, he had to be discouraged from taking too broad a historical view: “I have memories of numerous revision meetings where I’d say, ‘Well, all this stuff about people flying helicopters in Vietnam is very interesting, and I can see why you need to read it, and think about it, to write about why people wrote the way they did about battles in Italy in the sixteenth century, but, actually, the thesis has to be nearly all about battles in Italy in the sixteenth century.’ ”

After Harari received his doctorate, he returned to Jerusalem with the idea of writing a history of the gay experience in Israel. He met with Benjamin Kedar. Kedar recently said, “I gave him a hard look—‘Yuval, do it after you get tenure.’ ”

Harari, taking this advice, stuck with his specialty. But his continued interest in comparative history was evident in the 2007 book “ Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550 ,” whose anachronistic framing provoked some academic reviewers. And the following year, in “ The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000 ,” Harari was at last able to include an extended discussion of Vietnam War memoirs.

In 2003, Hebrew University initiated an undergraduate course, An Introduction to the History of the World. Such classes had begun appearing in a few history departments in the previous decade; traditional historians, Kedar said, were often disapproving, and still are: “They say, ‘You teach the French Revolution, and if somebody looks out of the window they miss the revolution’—all those jokes.” Gunn said that “Oxford makes sure people study a wide range of history, but it does it by making sure that people study a wide range of different detailed things, rather than one course that goes right across everything.”

Harari agreed to teach the world-history course, as well as one on war in the Middle Ages. He had always hated speaking to people he didn’t know. He told me that, as a younger man, “if I had to call the municipality to arrange some bureaucratic stuff, I would sit for like ten minutes by the telephone, just bringing up the courage.” (One can imagine his bliss in the dining hall at a meditation retreat—the sound of a hundred people not starting a conversation.) Even today, Harari is an unassuming lecturer: conferences sometimes give him a prizefighter’s introduction, with lights and music, at the end of which he comes warily to the podium, says, “Hello, everyone,” and sets up his laptop. Yahav described watching Harari recently freeze in front of an audience of thousands in Beijing. “I was, ‘Start moving! ’ ”

A woman sardonically reminds her exhusband of who she is and their entire sordid relationship history after he called...

As an uncomfortable young professor, Harari tended to write out his world-history lectures as a script. At one point, as part of an effort to encourage his students to listen to his words, rather than transcribe them, he began handing out copies of his notes. “They started circulating, even among students who were not in my class,” Harari recalled. “That’s when I thought, Ah, maybe there’s a book in it.” He imagined that a few students at other universities would buy the book, and perhaps “a couple of history buffs.”

This origin explains some of the qualities that distinguish “Sapiens.” Unlike many other nonfiction blockbusters, it isn’t full of catchy neologisms or cinematic scene-setting; its impact derives from a steady management of ideas, in prose that has the unhedged authority—and sometimes the inelegance—of a professor who knows how to make one or two things stick. (“An empire is a political order with two important characteristics . . .”) “Guns, Germs, and Steel” begins with a conversation between Jared Diamond and a Papua New Guinean politician; in “Sapiens,” Harari does not figure in the narrative. He told me, “Maybe it is some legacy of my study of memoirs and autobiographies. I know how dangerous it is to make personal experience your main basis for authority.”

It still astonishes Harari that readers became so excited about the early pages of “Sapiens,” which describe the coexistence of various Homo species. “I thought, This is so banal!” he told me. “There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I’m not an archeologist. I’m not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research. . . . It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.”

The Israeli edition, “A Brief History of Humankind,” was published in June, 2011. Yoram Yovell recalled that “Yuval became beloved very quickly,” and was soon a regular guest on Israeli television. “It was beautiful to see the way he handled it,” Yovell added. “He’s intellectually self-confident but truly modest.” The book initially failed to attract foreign publishers. Harari and Yahav marketed a print-on-demand English-language edition, on Amazon; this was Harari’s own translation, and it included his Gmail address on the title page, and illustrations by Yahav. It sold fewer than two thousand copies. In 2013, Yahav persuaded Deborah Harris, an Israeli literary agent whose clients include David Grossman and Tom Segev, to take on the book. She proposed edits and recommended hiring a translator. Harris recently recalled that, in the U.K., an auction of the revised manuscript began with twenty-two publishers, “and it went on and on and on,” whereas, in the U.S., “I was getting the most insulting rejections, of the kind ‘Who does this man think he is?’ ” Harvill Secker, Harari’s British publisher, paid significantly more for the book than HarperCollins did in the U.S.

Harari and Yahav recently visited Harris at her house, in Jerusalem; it also serves as her office. They had promised to cart away copies of “Sapiens”—in French, Portuguese, and Malay—that were filling up her garden shed. At her dining table, Harris recalled seeing “Sapiens” take off: “The reviews were extraordinary. And then Obama. And Gates.” (Gates, on his blog : “I’ve always been a fan of writers who try to connect the dots.”) Harris began spotting the book in airports; “Sapiens,” she said, was reaching people who read only one book a year.

There was a little carping from reviewers—“Mr. Harari’s claim that Columbus ignited the scientific revolution is surprising,” a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal wrote —but the book thrived in an environment of relative critical neglect. At the time of its publication, “Sapiens” was not reviewed in the Times , The New York Review of Books , or the Washington Post. Steven Gunn supposes that Harari, by working on a far greater time scale than the great historical popularizers of the twentieth century, like Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, substantially protected himself from experts’ scoffing. “ ‘Sapiens’ leapfrogs that, by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that nobody can say, “We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong,” ’ ” Gunn said. “Because what he’s doing is just building an extremely big model, about an extremely big process.” He went on, “Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.”

Deborah Harris did not work on “Homo Deus.” By then, Yahav had become Harari’s agent, after closely watching Harris’s process, and making a record of all her contacts. “It wasn’t even done secretly!” she said, laughing.

Yahav was sitting next to her. “He’s a maniac and a control freak,” Harris said. In her own dealings with publishers, she continued, “I have to retain a semblance of professionalism—I want these people to like me. He didn’t care! He’s never going to see these people again, and sell anything else to them. They can all think he’s horrible and ruthless.”

They discussed the controversy over the pliant Russian translation of “21 Lessons.” Harris said that, if she had been involved, “that would not have happened.”

Yahav, who for the first time looked a little pained, asked Harris if she would have refused all of the Russian publisher’s requests for changes.

“Russia, you don’t fuck around,” she said. “You don’t give them an inch.” She asked Harari if he would do things differently now.

“Hmm,” he said. Harari drew a distinction between changes he had approved and those he had not: for example, he hadn’t known that, in the dedication, “husband” would become “partner.” In public remarks, Harari has defended allowing some changes as an acceptable compromise when trying to reach a Russian audience. He has also said, “I’m not willing to write any lies. And I’m not willing to add any praise to the regime.”

They discussed the impending “Sapiens” spinoffs. Harris, largely enthusiastic about the plans, said, “I’m just not a graphic-novel person.” She then told Harari to wait before writing again. “I think you should learn to fly a plane,” she said. “You could do anything you want. Walk the Appalachian Trail.”

One day in mid-September, Harari walked into an auditorium set up in an eighteenth-century armory in Kyiv, wearing a Donna Karan suit and bright multicolored socks. He had just met with Olena Zelenska, the wife of the Ukrainian President. The next day, he would meet Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s former President, and accept a gift box of chocolates made by Poroshenko’s company. Harari was about to give a talk at a Yalta European Strategy conference, a three-day, invitation-only event modelled on Davos. YES is funded by Victor Pinchuk , the billionaire manufacturing magnate, with the aim of promoting Ukraine’s orientation toward the West, and of promoting Victor Pinchuk.

As people took their seats, Harari stood with Pinchuk at the front of the auditorium, and for a few minutes he was exposed to strangers. Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist, introduced himself. David Rubenstein, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the Carlyle Group, gave Harari his business card. Rubenstein has become a “thought leader” at gatherings like YES , and he interviews wealthy people for Bloomberg TV. (Later that day, during a YES dinner where President Volodymyr Zelensky was a guest, Rubenstein interviewed Robin Wright, the “ House of Cards ” star. His questions were not made less awkward by being barked. “ You’re obviously a very attractive woman ,” he said. “How did you decide what you wanted to do?”)

Harari’s talk lasted twenty-four minutes. He used schoolbook-style illustrations: chimney stacks, Michelangelo’s David. Nobody on Harari’s staff had persuaded him not to represent mass unemployment with art work showing only fifty men. He argued that the danger facing the world could be “stated in the form of a simple equation, which might be the defining equation of the twenty-first century: B times C times D equals AHH. Which means: biological knowledge, multiplied by computing power, multiplied by data, equals the ability to hack humans.” After the lecture, Harari had an onstage discussion with Pinchuk. “We should change the focus of the political conversation,” Harari said, referring to A.I. And: “This is one of the purposes of conferences like this—to change the global conversation.” Throughout Harari’s event, senior European politicians in the front row chatted among themselves.

When I later talked to Steven Pinker, he made a candid distinction between speaking opportunities that were “too interesting to turn down” and others “too lucrative to turn down.” Hugo Chittenden, a director at the London Speaker Bureau, an agency that books speakers for events like YES , told me that Harari’s fee in Kyiv would reflect the fact that he’s a fresh face; there’s only so much enthusiasm for hearing someone like Tony Blair give the speech he’s given on such occasions for the past decade. On the plane to Kyiv, Yahav had indicated to me that Harari’s fee would be more than twice what Donald Trump was paid when he made a brief video appearance at YES , in 2015. Trump received a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

In public, at least, Harari doesn’t echo Pinker’s point about money gigs, and he won’t admit to having concerns about earning a fee that might compensate him, in part, for laundering the reputations of others. “We can’t check everyone who’s coming to a conference,” he told me. He was unmoved when told that Jordan Peterson , the Canadian psychologist and self-help author known for his position that “the masculine spirit is under assault,” had cancelled his YES appearance. Later this year, in Israel, Harari plans to have a private conversation with Peterson. Harari said of Peterson’s representatives, “They offered to do a public debate. And we said that we don’t want to, because there is a danger that it will just be mud wrestling.” Yahav had earlier teased Harari, saying, “You don’t argue. If somebody says something you don’t like, you don’t say, ‘I don’t like it.’ You just shut up.”

In Kyiv, Harari gave several interviews to local journalists, and sometimes mentioned a man who had been on our flight from Israel to Ukraine. After the plane left the gate, there was a long delay, and the man stormed to the front, demanding to be let off. There are times, Harari told one reporter, when the thing “most responsible for your suffering is your own mind.” The subject of human suffering—even extreme suffering—doesn’t seem to agitate Harari in quite the way that industrial agriculture does. Indeed, Harari has taken up positions against what he calls humanism, by which he means “the worship of humanity,” and which he discovers in, among other places, the foundations of Nazism and Stalinism. (This characterization has upset humanists.) Some of this may be tactical—Harari is foregrounding a contested animal-rights position—but it also reflects an aspect of his Vipassana-directed thinking. Human suffering occurs; the issue is how to respond to it. Harari’s suggestion that the airline passenger, in becoming livid about the delay, had largely made his own misery was probably right; but to turn the man into a case study seemed to breeze past all of the suffering that involves more than a transit inconvenience.

The morning after Harari’s lecture, he welcomed Pinker to his hotel suite. They hadn’t met before this trip, but a few weeks earlier they had arranged to film a conversation, which Harari would release on his own platforms. Pinker later joked that, when making the plan, he’d spoken only with Harari’s “minions,” adding, “ I want to have minions.” Pinker has a literary agent, a speaking agent, and, at Harvard, a part-time assistant. Contemplating the scale of Harari’s operation, he said, without judgment, “I don’t know of any other academic or public intellectual who’s taken that route.”

Pinker is the author of, most recently, “ Enlightenment Now ,” which marshals evidence of recent human progress. “We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences,” he writes. “Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited.” He told me that, while preparing to meet Harari, he had refreshed his skepticism about futurology by rereading two well-known essays—Robert Kaplan’s “ The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet ,” published in The Atlantic in 1994, and “ The Long Boom ,” by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, published in Wired three years later (“We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?”).

As a camera crew set up, Harari affably told Pinker, “The default script is that you will be the optimist and I will be the pessimist. But we can try and avoid this.” They chatted about TV, and discovered a shared enthusiasm for “ Shtisel ,” an Israeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox family, and “ Veep .”

“What else do you watch?” Harari asked.

“ ‘ The Crown ,’ ” Pinker said.

“Oh, ‘The Crown’ is great!”

Harari had earlier told me that he prefers TV to novels; in a career now often focussed on ideas about narrative and interiority, his reflections on art seem to stop at the observation that “fictions” have remarkable power. Over supper in Israel, he had noted that, in the Middle Ages, “only what kings and queens did was important, and even then not everything they did,” whereas novels are likely “to tell you in detail about what some peasant did.” Onstage, at YES , he had said, “If we think about art as kind of playing on the human emotional keyboard, then I think A.I. will very soon revolutionize art completely.”

The taped conversation began. Harari began to describe future tech intrusions, and Pinker, pushing back, referred to the ubiquitous “telescreens” that monitor citizens in Orwell’s “ 1984 .” Today, Pinker said, it would be a “trivial” task to install such devices: “There could be, in every room, a government-operated camera. They could have done that decades ago. But they haven’t, certainly not in the West. And so the question is: why didn’t they? Partly because the government didn’t have that much of an interest in doing it. Partly because there would be enough resistance that, in a democracy, they couldn’t succeed.”

Harari said that, in the past, data generated by such devices could not have been processed; the K.G.B. could not have hired enough agents. A.I. removes this barrier. “This is not science fiction,” he said. “This is happening in various parts of the world. It’s happening now in China. It’s happening now in my home country, in Israel.”

Two angry looking cops hold hands as they arrest Cupid for shooting arrows at both of them.

“What you’ve identified is some of the problems of totalitarian societies or occupying powers,” Pinker said. “The key is how to prevent your society from being China.” In response, Harari suggested that it might have been only an inability to process such data that had protected societies from authoritarianism. He went on, “Suddenly, totalitarian regimes could have a technological advantage over the democracies.”

Pinker said, “The trade-off between efficiency and ethics is just in the very nature of reality. It has always faced us—even with much simpler algorithms, of the kind you could do with paper and pencil.” He noted that, for seventy years, psychologists have known that, in a medical setting, statistical decision-making outperforms human intuition. Simple statistical models could have been widely used to offer diagnoses of disease, forecast job performance, and predict recidivism. But humans had shown a willingness to ignore such models.

“My view, as a historian, is that seventy years isn’t a long time,” Harari said.

When I later spoke to Pinker, he said that he admired Harari’s avoidance of conventional wisdom, but added, “When it comes down to it, he is a liberal secular humanist.” Harari rejects the label, Pinker said, but there’s no doubt that Harari is an atheist, and that he “believes in freedom of expression and the application of reason, and in human well-being as the ultimate criterion.” Pinker said that, in the end, Harari seems to want “to be able to reject all categories.”

The next day, Harari and Yahav made a trip to Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat. They invited a few other people, and hired a guide. Yahav embraced a role of half-ironic worrier about health risks; the guide tried to reassure him by giving him his dosimeter, which measures radiation levels. When the device beeped, Yahav complained of a headache. In the ruined Lenin Square in Pripyat, he told Harari, “You’re not going to die on me. We’ve discussed this—I’m going to die first. I was smoking for years.”

Harari, whose work sometimes sounds regretful about most of what has happened since the Paleolithic era—in “Sapiens,” he writes that “the forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do”—began the day by anticipating, happily, a glimpse of the world as it would be if “humans destroyed themselves.” Walking across Pripyat’s soccer field, where mature trees now grow, he remarked on how quickly things had gone “back to normal.”

The guide asked if anyone had heard of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—the video game, which includes a sequence set in Pripyat.

“No,” Harari said.

“Just the most popular game in the world,” the guide said.

At dusk, Harari and Yahav headed back to Kyiv, in a black Mercedes. When Yahav sneezed, Harari said, “It’s the radiation starting.” As we drove through flat, forested countryside, Harari talked about his upbringing: his hatred of chess; his nationalist and religious periods. He said, “One thing I think about how humans work—the only thing that can replace one story is another story.”

We discussed the tall tales that occasionally appear in his writing. In “Homo Deus,” Harari writes that, in 2014, a Hong Kong venture-capital firm “broke new ground by appointing an algorithm named VITAL to its board.” A footnote provides a link to an online article , which makes clear that, in fact, there had been no such board appointment, and that the press release announcing it was a lure for “gullible” outlets. When I asked Harari if he’d accidentally led readers into believing a fiction, he appeared untroubled, arguing that the book’s larger point about A.I. encroachment still held.

In “Sapiens,” Harari writes in detail about a meeting in the desert between Apollo 11 astronauts and a Native American who dictated a message for them to take to the moon. The message, when later translated, was “They have come to steal your lands.” Harari’s text acknowledges that the story might be a “legend.”

“I don’t know if it’s a true story,” Harari told me. “It doesn’t matter—it’s a good story.” He rethought this. “It matters how you present it to the readers. I think I took care to make sure that at least intelligent readers will understand that it maybe didn’t happen.” (The story has been traced to a Johnny Carson monologue.)

Harari went on to say how much he’d liked writing an extended fictional passage, in “Homo Deus,” in which he imagines the belief system of a twelfth-century crusader. It begins, “Imagine a young English nobleman named John . . .” Harari had been encouraged in this experiment, he said, by the example of classical historians, who were comfortable fabricating dialogue, and by “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ,” by Douglas Adams, a book “packed with so much good philosophy.” No twentieth-century philosophical book besides “ Sources of the Self ,” by Charles Taylor, had influenced him more.

We were now on a cobbled street in Kyiv. Harari said, “Maybe the next book will be a novel.”

At a press conference in the city, Harari was asked a question by Hannah Hrabarska, a Ukrainian news photographer. “I can’t stop smiling,” she began. “I’ve watched all your lectures, watched everything about you.” I spoke to her later. She said that reading “Sapiens” had “completely changed” her life. Hrabarska was born the week of the Chernobyl disaster, in 1986. “When I was a child, I dreamed of being an artist,” she said. “But then politics captured me.” When the Orange Revolution began, in 2004, she was eighteen, and “ so idealistic.” She studied law and went into journalism. In the winter of 2013-14, she photographed the Euromaidan protests, in Kyiv, where more than a hundred people were killed. “You always expect everything will change, will get better,” she said. “And it doesn’t.”

Hrabarska read “Sapiens” three or four years ago. She told me that she had previously read widely in history and philosophy, but none of that material had ever “interested me on my core level.” She found “Sapiens” overwhelming, particularly in its passages on prehistory, and in its larger revelation that she was “one of the billions and billions that lived, and didn’t make any impact and didn’t leave any trace.” Upon finishing the book, Hrabarska said, “you kind of relax, don’t feel this pressure anymore—it’s O.K. to be insignificant.” For her, the discovery of “Sapiens” is that “life is big, but only for me.” This knowledge “lets me own my life.”

Reading “Sapiens” had helped her become “more compassionate” toward people around her, although less invested in their opinions. Hrabarska had also spent more time on creative photography projects. She said, “This came from a feeling of ‘O.K., it doesn’t matter that much, I’m just a little human, no one cares.’ ”

Hrabarska has disengaged from politics. “I can choose to be involved, not to be involved,” she said. “No one cares, and I don’t care, too.” ♦

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Book Review

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Title: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Publisher: Harvill Secker

Genre: History, Anthropology, Philosophy

First Publication: 2011(In Hebrew in Israel ) 2014(In English)

Book Summary: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth . Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.

How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?

In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?

Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power … and our future.

Book Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a book by Yuval Noah Harari first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011, and in English in 2014. The book surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing on Homo sapiens.

Harari’s work, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, situates its account of human history within a framework provided by the natural sciences, particularly evolutionary biology : he sees biology as setting the limits of possibility for human activity, and sees culture as shaping what happens within those bounds.

The academic discipline of history is the account of cultural change. Harari surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing on Homo sapiens. He divides the history of Sapiens into four major parts:

The Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 BCE, when Sapiens evolved imagination).
The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE, the development of agriculture).
The unification of humankind (the gradual consolidation of human political organisations towards one global empire).
The Scientific Revolution (c. 1500 CE, the emergence of objective science).

There are countless significant milestones described in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. However, the author repeatedly refers to two events – The Cognitive Revolution where Humankind developed language, abstract thought, created gods, made art and many other things we recognise today as ‘being human’.

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

The other is The Agricultural Revolution, which sounds simple, but its implications are massive. This revolution enables an increasingly smaller percentage of the population to grow food for others in society enabling these people to do other things like make iron, think, bake and all the other duties that make up a developing society. The Cognitive Revolution occurred about 70,000 years ago and the Agricultural Revolution around 12,000 years ago. In between, we were Hunters and Gatherers.

Around 2.5 million years ago humans evolved. Some of our siblings included Homo rudolfensis (East Africa), Homo erectus (East Asia) and Homo neanderthalensis. Homo erectus proved to be the most durable of the human species, lasting 2 million years. Homo sapiens started kicking goals in East Africa around 200,000 years ago. The author makes the assertion “ it’s doubtful Homo sapiens will be here in 1,000 years from now; but definitely not in 2 million years-time.”

Homo sapiens managed to drastically disrupt whatever environment they moved into relatively quickly. We were responsible for the extinction of 50% of Megafauna before we invented the wheel, started writing or making iron tools. In fact, our first wave of colonisation was one of the greatest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom.

“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”

The author tackles the hard to define notion of happiness. He says historians have neglected this indicator over time, to be fair it seems a hard thing to measure. But he believes the increase in complexity of human evolution from the Agricultural Revolution has really resulted in a decrease in human ‘happiness’. I understand what he is saying – seems during our time as hunters and gatherers we would have had spare time to relax after we ‘hunted and gathered’.

The advent of more complex societies seems to have burdened us with tasks, jobs, deadlines, costs, responsibilities. If you look at our lives today, we are surrounded by technology , money responsibilities, change, screens, alarms, traffic, the list is endless. It’s not difficult, in my view, to mount an argument that we humans are perhaps under more pressure, busier, and maybe un-happier than ever before. That’s not to mention the misery we have inflicted on millions of others over the centuries in wars, slavery and various other forms of subjugation.

Generally, if the book has captured the imagination of millions of readers, it is a good thing, especially in the time and age where peoples’ attentions are so incredibly short and distracted by a thousand competing types of information. Any book that covers such big and important concepts as this and can command people’s interest deserves respect. Stimulating discourse or making people rethink their assumptions is a great accomplishment.

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Book Review: "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari

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If you were unfortunate enough to catch me after a beer this past month, you probably know about the book I’ve been reading — Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari .

It’s an excellent book I’m happy to talk about.

Harari is on the younger side of the scholarly world, barely 40 years old now, which is a year after the book’s initial publication and certainly years after he started work on it. He is a gifted thinker and writer, with a clear, wise voice and a descriptive, logical style that seems timeless. It reminded me of Edward Gibbon, but without quite the biting humor Gibbon could weave into his crystal clear prose.

Because much of what makes Sapiens such an astounding and rewarding read is how Harari unveils insight after insight, writing a review of it is a challenge. The insights come regularly, and he drops them so adroitly I found myself repeatedly putting the book down to take a walk and ponder the implications. I don’t want to ruin that experience for you.

To minimize the spoiler damage I might do, I’ll limit my review to general recommendation of “read this if you want to understand humanity better and come closer to accepting its strange ways and place in the world,” while adding some thoughts about a few threads that have relevance to scholarly publishers, editors, and researchers.

Harari starts by observing that many other Homo species existed contemporaneously with us, but we are the only one that remains, which is both impressive and worrisome. Homo neanderthanlensis, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo floresiensis , and others all vanished around the time that Harari labels the “cognitive revolution” of Homo sapiens .

Many changes occurred at this time, but one that seems to have set us apart was our ability to gossip, using spoken and written language to talk about each other and compare notes on a broad scale.

Add to this our ability to create fictions that allowed us to unify in ways the other species show no evidence of having done on a scale comparable to ours, and you have quite a group. Combining these two attributes allowed us to form larger groups, coordinate our activities much more closely, close ranks more effectively, marshal more resources to complete our plans, keep tabs on each other well, dream up reasons to do things, and dominate the other species we encountered. Quickly, our mid-food-chain species rocketed to the top. It happened so fast that we’re still feeling a little wobbly about the change in our fortunes.

The “gossip” and “fiction” aspects have relevance to the scholarly publishing world, as we deal with both. What we publish is very refined gossip from labs and researchers all over the world, who are participating in a fictitious human endeavor we call “science.”

Tying the concept of “gossip” to our world is somewhat freeing, but takes nothing away from the seriousness of what we do. After all, gossips who spread misinformation are ostracized, and deservedly so — it goes for the originator (author) or the transmitter. Making sure the gossip is correct matters a great deal to the reputation of those involved. And that, my friends, is your new way of thinking about journal publication — fancy gossiping.

But science is a fiction? To Harari it is, albeit an important and useful one. Harari makes a clean distinction between natural reality and human fictions. There is nothing in the natural world that is “science” — we made it up, and if we perish, it perishes, too. Science is a human fabrication, one we are constantly refining or redefining. We lived for tens of thousands of years without it — expanding our territories, making and remaking cultures, and dominating the animal world. It only mattered from about the year 1500 onward.

With the invention of science (an excellent and related book is David Wootton’s The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution ), a great deal of human potential was unleashed. As Harari writes:

[Since 1500]. . . human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.

But, as both Harari and Wootton point out, before the invention of science came the invention of ignorance, a fascinating transition itself. Instead of thinking that all knowledge existed among priests or royalty, suddenly — likely with Columbus’ expedition to the New World — there was something inexplicable that no text or priest or king had ever seen before. Suddenly, we had to face our ignorance, and with ignorance came permission to invent science to fill the gaps.

You would think that with its track record, science would have become the dominant pursuit of humans. It’s clearly our path forward. But that’s humans for you — we’re great at contradicting ourselves and creating conceptual traps that take decades or centuries to resolve. Nevertheless, it remains worrisome within our current political and socioeconomic systems that we are pulling back from investments in science. It doesn’t make historical sense. As Harari writes:

During the last five centuries, humans increasingly came to believe that they could increase their capabilities by investing in scientific research. This wasn’t just blind faith – it was repeatedly proven empirically. The more proofs there were, the more resources wealthy people and governments were willing to put into science.

There have been major economic benefits from investments in science, and Harari helpfully quantifies these:

The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. . . . The total value of goods and services provided by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion.

The invention of science has been one of the most important in our history. However, it does not stand alone. Language, agriculture, religion, empires, and money are also tagged as critical inventions. Depending on your starting point, you may find disturbing or liberating insights about polytheism and imperialism in the book. No matter — collectively believing in such fictions has allowed humans to gain and retain dominance over the world. Sometimes a fiction can involve turning a blind eye to what is right in front of us.

Working in scientific and scholarly publishing at a time when money is demonized to some extent, Harari’s analysis of money as a human invention is revelatory:

. . . money is . . . the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs, and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age, or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.

I have to admit, I’d never thought of money before as “the apogee of human tolerance,” but now I see it everywhere. It’s especially apparent when you travel, when you need the cooperation of strangers everywhere you turn, from taxis/Ubers to hotels/AirBnBs to restaurants/bars — money provides a safe and non-judgmental way for strangers to interact positively. Rarely are you asked your intentions when seeking transportation, shelter, food, or drink. Even if you are, if you can pay, these questions vanish.

When you also grasp how fungible money is — how money earned from theft or selling drugs can be converted into food to feed hungry children or donations to help flood victims — you begin to appreciate its power and importance. You also begin to see how pirates like Sci-Hub and those who use it are thumbing their noses at a major human achievement, and one worth preserving — namely, a major trust system (money), which helps large groups cooperate in ways they would not otherwise. Pirates exploit everyone else’s trust and leave the system. After reading Sapiens , it’s clear to me that this way of acting is literally inhuman.

Sapiens delivers a boatload of humility, which sets it apart in a culture of self-importance. You may never think of yourself, and the human-created world you inhabit, the same way again. And you may go back to your job with a new set of attitudes and insights as you earn “the apogee of human tolerance” to manage gossip flows emanating from a powerful and fictitious system of knowledge-based ignorance peculiar to our species.

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson is the CEO of RedLink and RedLink Network, a past-President of SSP, and the founder of the Scholarly Kitchen. He has worked as Publisher at AAAS/Science, CEO/Publisher of JBJS, Inc., a publishing executive at the Massachusetts Medical Society, Publishing Director of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own.

12 Thoughts on "Book Review: "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari"

Harari’s seminal contribution is the idea of human created “stories” or fictions, or as Borges wrote, Ficciones. As was pointed out, here, that is what created “science”. What is worth considering is that it is the “story” that gives money its ability to function. If the story changes, then the exchange value changes and can even collapse a country’s economy or, by accepting the story of neo-classical economics, stories can result in concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1% as an example.

Stories can lead to discounting of items once considered “priceless”. Which leads us to the article’s final “leap of faith”. Perhaps the research community finds that the “value” or cost of academic journals need to be discounted because they do not accept stories around the sticker price that the publishers place on their product or the pricing structure that has lead to alternatives such as the variety of open access journals, and, even Sci-Hub.

Sapiens is an interesting book as are the interviews the author has given. But there is too large a leap from Sapiens to Sci-Hub, here

Jun 15, 2016, 9:04 AM

I describe the broken faith in money more in another blog ( http://www.caldera-publishing.com/blog/2016/6/7/money-and-unity ). I do not think the leap is “too large.” In fact, it is quite relevant. Stories can be misleading and wrong, and stories that undercut major human achievements should be viewed with heavy skepticism. The Sci-Hub story is one of these. To me, it is analogous to “intelligent design” and its relationship to actual science — a diversion full of misleading inferences and unhelpful ideas, while still a good story for some who are susceptible. Believing that undercutting money is an economic solution is clearly a dead-end story. Counterfeiting is punished severely because it abuses a trust element. Stealing and piracy are also worthy of heavy punishment as betrayals of human achievements. Arguing price or who pays is one thing — stealing is another entirely.

Finally, publishers are part of science, as Wootton points out. In fact, there is no “science” without publication. Publishing is what makes it science rather than trade or state secrets.

By Kent Anderson
Jun 15, 2016, 9:37 AM

According to Elbakyan, in the interview she gave at the recent UNT open-access conference, communism and science go together and justify the sharing of knowledge through Sci-Hub because knowledge, considered as property, is theft. That belief has a weird internal logic and I’m sure, in her mind, does not involve any violation of trust but quite the contrary.

By Sandy Thatcher
Jun 15, 2016, 10:47 AM

Ah, science and communism, a pairing that has worked so well in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

By David Crotty
Jun 15, 2016, 1:12 PM

Wouldn’t a communist approach to science and publishing include the scholars taking back the means of production? i.e university presses and learned societies. Sci-Hub doesn’t seem communist and definitely isn’t internally consistent.

Jun 15, 2016, 4:30 PM

Trust is a concept that can be separated from money. One just needs to look at the water temples of Bali and the Subaks where water, up and down the hills has been shared by trust for a 1000 years. Or, one can look at the prehistoric trading systems across large distances or the Halwalas of East Africa and the Middle East where money or value can be exchanged because of trust, and not the reverse. Then there are the forex exchangers who don’t follow the official exchange rates but discount the local currencies where exchange rate fluctuations are measures of trust in value.

Science goes on in communities and isolation. Ideas were often exchanged between professionals well before journals existed (The Royal Society’s journal appeared late in the game, after cave paintings and the establishment of universities). Part of the controversy around publishing is the value of publishing, or cost as seen by many scientists to be too expensive, artificially inflated; and there is a loss of trust which has lead to alternatives. Elbakyan raises the interesting point regarding science under socialism, an area that needs further articulation. But the issue at hand is that trust is needed for the money system to function and not the reverse. The STEM publishers have never pleaded for “trust” because their costs/pricing structure has made their survival marginal or in doubt. That makes their “story” of value seem less than trustworthy to the academic community, or a substantive section thereof.

Yes, Sci-Hub may be seen as a proprietary knowledge “thief”, but there are publishers that are looking at it. A recently bio/meidical site, Meta(alpha) is making agreements with publishers to let researchers access, at minimum, abstracts and to build their databases thereof. But the business model of the venture is to use predictive analytics on use and analysis and sell that to publishers. In effect a legitimate variance which can then use Google or Amazon type of analytics to understand the direction of research markets.

Jun 15, 2016, 12:07 PM

Local trust systems certainly exist. What makes money different is that it can surmount localities and borders, cultures and religions, and so forth. The fact that you use obscure examples only reinforces the point. Science does go on in communities and isolation, but it isn’t really science until the results are published. Universities appeared before science because they were seen by those in power as a way of reinforcing knowledge and the status quo. They were not devoted to discovery until science emerged.

Interestingly, most journals and publishers are trusted, when you look at the data. So I don’t think the breakdown in trust is as dire as you believe. In fact, Sci-Hub is only valuable because it leverages this trust (in journals and publishers and books and editors and peer-review). It breaks trust in money, which is a two-step trust — you trust that the other person trusts it.

Meta believes in money, believe me. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, the point is that it’s actually an awesome achievement that we have a system like this. It’s human. It has helped us do useful things. It increases and expands trust.

Jun 15, 2016, 12:21 PM

First, it would be interesting to understand the data (let’s be scientific) regarding the trust of researchers and the publishers. I will suggest that the trust in what is published should be very high since it is a trust in fellow researchers who vet the materials and when there are problems, researchers will respond to their colleagues. The trust issue between researchers and publishers is an issue of “money”, the cost to take researchers’ works to distribution. Publishers, here in the Kitchen, also, have argued “value” as a way of deflecting and, perhaps, misdirecting. If there was trust in that argument then the alternatives would not have materialized and, yet, the issue is far from settled today.

It is interesting that science is now defined as being “science” if it is published. The current, and successful efforts to redefine in these terms has moved not the science but the publishing as a measure. Thus it’s not the purpose to make it science by publishing but to make one piece of greater merit where it is published. Thus the science is value in itself, but choices of where published is a choice that may, once predictive analytics comes of age, make it irrelevant as to the journal as far as science, stripped of “marketing” is accessible, even that which may be in an obscure journal. This, of course, is where Meta and other systems based on deep learning will, in near term prove interesting. It is what deep learning is allowing via mashups of data too large to be comprehensible by humans but being able to be turned into narrative by one of Watson’s children.

Trust, using money as a surrogate, is a cultural issue, It exists across both time and space. Misunderstanding or ignoring time is at one’s peril. The water temples, though ancient are critical in understanding a serious mistake made in the name of contemporary science where the attempt to implement the “green revolution” became an economic and ecological disaster until the system was designated for protection in today’s world. It took complexity science to correct the situation.

As I noted previously, it is “trust” that allows money to even exist, much less be transferred almost seamlessly using one’s and zero’s in the bankers’ microchips. it takes a trusted chain for this to occur if one has ever engaged in international trade. In fact, the Halwala, a trust network is of great concern to security agencies because of this trust allowing value to be transferred.

Jun 16, 2016, 2:57 AM

We get requests from companies like this on a weekly basis (there are a ton of them). No one has yet shown that this sort of analysis can produce useful intel, or perhaps more importantly, that there is a market willing to pay for such intel. ResearchGate and Academia.edu are in much the same unproven business.

One issue I have with the model that many offer is that they come to a publisher and ask for raw materials (metadata, abstracts, full text indexing) for free, and then attempt to sell the resulting product back to those same publishers, essentially asking for payment (in data or cash) on both ends. I’d be much more willing to patronize a company that either paid me for the raw materials that they need to make their product, or supplied the end product for free in exchange for those raw materials (and sold the product to others who aren’t supplying them).

Jun 15, 2016, 1:17 PM

The politicization of science that now occupies the climate change debate is not a good sign.

By careyrowland
Jun 15, 2016, 9:38 PM

Politics and science have been joined at the hip since Day 1. It’s nothing new. Harari convincingly details how science is always political at some level. In fact, the reason we started to realize there was climate change was based on political movements that asked science to look at pollution, its longterm effects on human health, and changes in climatology that might occur. “Politicization of science” may be the wrong phrase — “undermining of science with corruption and anachronisms” may be better.

Jun 15, 2016, 10:40 PM

Comments are closed.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Hardcover – Illustrated, February 10, 2015

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Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout.

New York Times Bestseller

A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.

Part of series A Brief History Series
Print length 464 pages
Language English
Publisher Harper
Publication date February 10, 2015
Dimensions 6 x 1.37 x 9 inches
ISBN-10 0062316095
ISBN-13 978-0062316097
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An Amazon Best Book of the Month for February 2015: Yuval Noah Harari has some questions. Among the biggest: How did Homo sapiens (or Homo sapiens sapiens , if you’re feeling especially wise today) evolve from an unexceptional savannah-dwelling primate to become the dominant force on the planet, emerging as the lone survivor out of six distinct, competing hominid species? He also has some answers, and they’re not what you’d expect. Tackling evolutionary concepts from a historian’s perspective, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , describes human development through a framework of three not-necessarily-orthodox “Revolutions”: the Cognitive, the Agricultural, and the Scientific. His ideas are interesting and often amusing: Why have humans managed to build astonishingly large populations when other primate groups top out at 150 individuals? Because our talent for gossip allows us to build networks in societies too large for personal relationships between everyone, and our universally accepted “imagined realities”--such as money, religion, and Limited Liability Corporations—keep us in line. Who cultivated whom, humans or wheat? . Wheat. Though the concepts are unusual and sometimes heavy (as is the book, literally) Harari’s deft prose and wry, subversive humor make quick work of material prone to academic tedium. He’s written a book of popular nonfiction (it was a bestseller overseas, no doubt in part because his conclusions draw controversy) landing somewhere in the middle of a Venn diagram of genetics, sociology, and history. Throughout, Harari returns frequently to another question: Does all this progress make us happier, our lives easier? The answer might disappoint you. -- Jon Foro

“ Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language.” — Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel , Collapse , and The World until Yesterday

“ Sapiens is learned, thought-provoking and crisply written…. Fascinating.” — Wall Street Journal

“In Sapiens , Harari delves deep into our history as a species to help us understand who we are and what made us this way. An engrossing read.” — Dan Ariely, New York Times Bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“Yuval Noah Harari’s celebrated Sapiens does for human evolution what Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time did for physics.… He does a superb job of outlining our slow emergence and eventual domination of the planet.” — Forbes

“Ambitious and illuminating …the wonderful and terrifying saga of the human species on earth.” — Christian Science Monitor

“[I]nteresting and provocative…It gives you a sense of perspective on how briefly we’ve been on this earth, how short things like agriculture and science have been around, and why it makes sense for us to not take them for granted.” — President Barack Obama

“I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human history…you’ll have a hard time putting it down.” — Bill Gates

“Thank God someone finally wrote [this] exact book.” — Sebastian Junger

“Yuval Noah Harari is an emerging rock-star lecturer at the nexus of history and science…. Sapiens takes readers on a sweeping tour of the history of our species…. Harari’s formidable intellect sheds light on the biggest breakthroughs in the human story…important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens.” — Washington Post

“It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species.…It is one hell of a story. And it has seldom been told better…. Compulsively readable and impossibly learned.” — Michael Gerson, Washington Post

“This was the most surprising and thought-provoking book I read this year.” — Atlantic.com

“Yuval Noah Harari’s full-throated review of our species may have been blurbed by Jared Diamond, but Harari’s conclusions are at once balder and less tendentious than that of his famous colleague.” — New York magazine

“This title is one of the exceptional works of nonfiction that is both highly intellectual and compulsively readable… a fascinating, hearty read.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“An encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view.…The great debates of history aired out with satisfying vigor.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Writing with wit and verve, Harari…attempts to explain how Homo sapiens came to be the dominant species on Earth as well as the sole representative of the human genus.… Provocative and entertaining.” — Publishers Weekly

“The most idea-packed work of non-fiction I’ve read in years.” — Dick Meyer, www.abcactionnews.com

“In this sweeping look at the history of humans, Harari offers readers the chance to reconsider, well, everything, from a look at why Homo sapiens endured to a compelling discussion of how society organizes itself through fictions.” — Booklist Best Books of the Year

“It’s not often that a book offers readers the possibility to reconsider, well, everything. But that’s what Harari does in this sweeping look at the history of humans.… Readers of every stripe should put this at the top of their reading lists. Thinking has never been so enjoyable.” — Booklist (starred review)

“The sort of book that sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain…. Harari…is an intellectual acrobat whose logical leaps will have you gasping with admiration.” — John Carey, Sunday Times (London)

“Harari’s account of how we conquered the Earth astonishes with its scope and imagination…. One of those rare books that lives up to the publisher’s blurb...brilliantly clear, witty and erudite.” — Ben Shepard, the Observer (London)

“An absorbing, provocative history of civilization…packed with heretical thinking and surprising facts. This riveting, myth-busting book cannot be summarised…you will simply have to read it.” — John Gray, Financial Times (London)

“Full of…high-perspective, shocking and wondrous stories, as well as strange theories and startling insights.” — Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

“Not only is Harari eloquent and humane, he is often wonderfully, mordantly funny” — The Independent (London)

“Engaging and informative…. Extremely interesting.” — Guardian (London)

“Harari can write…really, really write, with wit, clarity, elegance, and a wonderful eye for metaphor.” — The Times (Ireland)

From the Back Cover

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens . How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?

In Sapiens , Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?

Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.

About the Author

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari , bestselling historian and philosopher, is considered one of the world’s most influential intellectuals today. His popular books—including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow; 21 Lessons for the 21st Century; and the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us— have sold more than 45 million copies in 65 languages. Harari co-founded Sapienship, a social impact company with projects in the fields of education and storytelling, whose main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today. Harari has a PhD in history from the University of Oxford and currently lectures in the department of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; Illustrated edition (February 10, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062316095
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062316097
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.66 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.37 x 9 inches
#13 in History of Civilization & Culture
#15 in Evolution (Books)
#15 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)

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Yuval noah harari.

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. His books have been translated into 65 languages, with 45 million copies sold worldwide. 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' (2014) looked deep into our past, 'Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow' (2016) considered far-future scenarios, and '21 Lessons for the 21st Century' (2018) zoomed in on the biggest questions of the present moment. 'Sapiens: A Graphic History' (launched in 2020) is a radical adaptation of 'Sapiens' into a four-part graphic novel series, which Harari created and co-wrote in collaboration with comics artists David Vandermeulen (co-writer) and Daniel Casanave (illustrator). 'Unstoppable Us' (launched in 2022) is Harari's first book series for children, telling the epic true story of humans and our superpower in four volumes, and featuring illustrations by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz.

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Paperback Summary and Analysis of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari Book

ISBN: 1723951862

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Summary and Analysis of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Now a #1 New Release on Amazon Yuval Noah Harari's #1 New York Times Bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind." WHY BUY THIS BOOK: Save time by reading this summarySave money by buying this summaryGain more in-depth knowledge ABOUT THE ORIGINAL BOOK: A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark ZuckerbergFrom a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity

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These 5 Books Can Give You More Than a College Degree

I n the midst of late-night study sessions, essay reviews for that upcoming paper, and pondering " write papers for me " solutions, have you ever wondered if there’s more to learning than what’s found in college textbooks? Well, you’re onto something.

Books, especially those outside academic curriculums, can offer a wealth of knowledge, insights, and life lessons that often surpass what you learn in a lecture hall. Let’s explore some groundbreaking books that can give you more than a college degree.

“Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” offers a journey into the depths of the human mind. Kahneman, a renowned psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences, introduces us to the two thinking systems: fast/emotional and slow/logical.

Throughout the book, Kahneman engages readers with compelling examples and insightful experiments that reveal how our thinking can often be flawed and biased, even when we feel we are being rational.

This book lays bare the inner workings of decision-making. It illuminates how we make choices in our daily lives, from the mundane to the significant. It’s a transformative read that reshapes your understanding of logic, reason, and human error.

“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari

“Sapiens” is a grand narrative of human history. It takes readers on an epic journey through the annals of human evolution, from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa to the rise of empires and the complexities of modern life.

In this sweeping narrative, Harari sheds light on:

The cognitive revolution ‒ how Homo sapiens came to dominate the Earth, thanks to our unique ability to believe in shared myths;
The agricultural revolution ‒ the transformation from foraging to farming, which changed our societies and lifestyles irrevocably;
The unification of humankind ‒ the formation of larger and more complex civilizations.
The scientific revolution ‒ a recent development that has given humans god-like powers but also the responsibility for the future of life on Earth.

“Sapiens” prompts us to ponder over our origins, our future, and our place in the world.

“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey

The self-help book is a guide for personal and professional transformation. Covey introduces seven habits that promise to change not only the way you work but also the way you live.

The book goes beyond traditional productivity tips and delves into character development and intrinsic values. Covey emphasizes that real change starts from within and radiates outward.

Covey’s book is especially relevant in a world where success is often superficially defined. It encourages students to build a foundation of effective habits that lead to lasting and meaningful achievements.

Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/123-let-s-go-imaginary-text-704767/

“Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell challenges the traditional narrative of success that focuses solely on individual talent and ambition. Instead, he introduces us to a world where success is also a product of historical and cultural circumstances, unexpected opportunities, and the amount of time spent practicing one’s craft.

He uses compelling stories and research to illustrate how factors like birth month, cultural heritage, and even the 10,000-hour rule play a significant role in shaping high achievers.

Gladwell’s book is a revelation, especially for students who are often fed the narrative that success is only about hard work and talent. “Outliers” encourages students to consider their background, opportunities, and the sheer amount of practice in their pursuits. Gladwell’s insightful analysis shows that success is not just about what you do but also where, when, and how you do it.

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie

First published in the 1930s, the principles discussed in this book are still relevant today. Carnegie’s book delves into the psychology behind everyday interactions and provides practical advice for enhancing communication and influence. The core of his teachings revolves around the idea that understanding and empathizing with others’ perspectives is the key to building meaningful connections.

The book breaks down essential interpersonal skills and presents them in a manner that is easy to understand and apply. Carnegie also touches upon how to handle disagreements and criticisms constructively.

The lessons in “How to Win Friends and Influence People” extend beyond just making friends; they are about developing a charismatic and considerate persona that can lead to success in various aspects of life. In a world where networking is often key to opportunities, Carnegie’s teachings offer timeless wisdom for building a network with authenticity and integrity.

The Bottom Line

From understanding the complexities of human behavior and history to mastering interpersonal skills and redefining success, these reads provide a well-rounded education.

Some of the most valuable lessons come from outside the classroom. So, immerse yourself in these books and complement your college education with insights and wisdom that will last a lifetime.

In the midst of late-night study sessions, essay reviews for that upcoming paper, and pondering "write papers for me" solutions.

Product Identifiers

Publisher HarperCollins
ISBN-10 0062316117
ISBN-13 9780062316110
eBay Product ID (ePID) 211941472

Product Key Features

Book Title Sapiens : a Brief History of Humankind
Author Yuval Noah Harari
Format Trade Paperback
Language English
Topic Civilization, Social Aspects, Reference, Life Sciences / Evolution, General, World
Publication Year 2018
Genre Technology & Engineering, Science, History, Philosophy
Number of Pages 464 Pages
Item Length 9in
Item Height 1in
Item Width 6in
Item Weight 33.3 Oz

Additional Product Features

Lc Classification Number Cb113.H4h3713 2015
Reviews [I]nteresting and provocative...It gives you a sense of perspective on how briefly we've been on this earth, how short things like agriculture and science have been around, and why it makes sense for us to not take them for granted., Harari's account of how we conquered the Earth astonishes with its scope and imagination.... One of those rare books that lives up to the publisher's blurb...brilliantly clear, witty and erudite., An encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view.â€¦The great debates of history aired out with satisfying vigor., This title is one of the exceptional works of nonfiction that is both highly intellectual and compulsively readable... a fascinating, hearty read., The sort of book that sweeps the cobwebs out of your brainâ€¦. Harariâ€¦is an intellectual acrobat whose logical leaps will have you gasping with admiration., An absorbing, provocative history of civilization...packed with heretical thinking and surprising facts. This riveting, myth-busting book cannot be summarised...you will simply have to read it., Harari's account of how we conquered the Earth astonishes with its scope and imaginationâ€¦. One of those rare books that lives up to the publisher's blurb...brilliantly clear, witty and erudite., Yuval Noah Harari is an emerging rock-star lecturer at the nexus of history and science.... Sapiens takes readers on a sweeping tour of the history of our species.... Harari's formidable intellect sheds light on the biggest breakthroughs in the human story...important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens., Sapiens takes readers on a sweeping tour of the history of our species.... Harari's formidable intellect sheds light on the biggest breakthroughs in the human story...important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens., It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species....It is one hell of a story. And it has seldom been told better.... Compulsively readable and impossibly learned., In Sapiens, Harari delves deep into our history as a species to help us understand who we are and what made us this way. An engrossing read., Full ofâ€¦high-perspective, shocking and wondrous stories, as well as strange theories and startling insights., Yuval Noah Harari's celebrated Sapiens does for human evolution what Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time did for physics.... He does a superb job of outlining our slow emergence and eventual domination of the planet., [I]nteresting and provocativeâ€¦It gives you a sense of perspective on how briefly we've been on this earth, how short things like agriculture and science have been around, and why it makes sense for us to not take them for granted., Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language., Here is a simple reason why Sapiens has risen explosively to the ranks of an international best-seller. It tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language. You will love it!, Harari can write...really, really write, with wit, clarity, elegance, and a wonderful eye for metaphor., Yuval Noah Harari's celebrated Sapiens does for human evolution what Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time did for physics.â€¦ He does a superb job of outlining our slow emergence and eventual domination of the planet., Harari can writeâ€¦really, really write, with wit, clarity, elegance, and a wonderful eye for metaphor., In this sweeping look at the history of humans, Harari offers readers the chance to reconsider, well, everything, from a look at why Homo sapiens endured to a compelling discussion of how society organizes itself through fictions., This title is one of the exceptional works of nonfiction that is both highly intellectual and compulsively readableâ€¦ a fascinating, hearty read., An encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view....The great debates of history aired out with satisfying vigor., Full of...high-perspective, shocking and wondrous stories, as well as strange theories and startling insights., It's not often that a book offers readers the possibility to reconsider, well, everything. But that's what Harari does in this sweeping look at the history of humans.â€¦ Readers of every stripe should put this at the top of their reading lists. Thinking has never been so enjoyable., The sort of book that sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain.... Harari...is an intellectual acrobat whose logical leaps will have you gasping with admiration., Writing with wit and verve, Harariâ€¦attempts to explain how Homo sapiens came to be the dominant species on Earth as well as the sole representative of the human genus.â€¦ Provocative and entertaining., It's not often that a book offers readers the possibility to reconsider, well, everything. But that's what Harari does in this sweeping look at the history of humans.... Readers of every stripe should put this at the top of their reading lists. Thinking has never been so enjoyable., Sapiens takes readers on a sweeping tour of the history of our speciesâ€¦. Harari's formidable intellect sheds light on the biggest breakthroughs in the human storyâ€¦important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens., It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species.â€¦It is one hell of a story. And it has seldom been told betterâ€¦. Compulsively readable and impossibly learned., I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human historyâ€¦you'll have a hard time putting it down., Writing with wit and verve, Harari...attempts to explain how Homo sapiens came to be the dominant species on Earth as well as the sole representative of the human genus.... Provocative and entertaining., I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human history...you'll have a hard time putting it down., Yuval Noah Harari's full-throated review of our species may have been blurbed by Jared Diamond, but Harari's conclusions are at once balder and less tendentious than that of his famous colleague., An absorbing, provocative history of civilizationâ€¦packed with heretical thinking and surprising facts. This riveting, myth-busting book cannot be summarisedâ€¦you will simply have to read it.
Target Audience Trade
Lccn 2014-028418
Dewey Decimal 909
Dewey Edition 23
Illustrated Yes

A handbook for humankind

Sapiens is an insightful, history-laden explanation of how and why we humans organize ourselves the way we do. At the same time, it's a readable story of human history. Harari is an apt guide who doesn't preach, but lays out for us how we may have come by some of our inner workings. At a time when the future looks opaque, an unflinching look at our past can do wonders. I read all three Harari books this past summer, but found Sapiens to be the most compelling and important work of the three. A book that will change your mind, if you're open to it.

Excellent read.

Great read. Easy read and the author explains everything in layman terms.

Great book if you love total world history and why things happen the way they do. From the dawn of man until the present time, the book gives us a view of where we were and where we may be going as a species.

History Nonfiction Yuval Noah Harari Paperbacks Books

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Sapiens Book Review
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
To order Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind for £18.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. Explore more on these topics Science and ...
"Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind" Book Review
Learn more. "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is a bestseller praised by Barack Obama and Bill Gates. The nonfiction book explores the history and evolution of humans and the modern world ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind review
History, for Harari, is largely made up of accidents; and his real theme is the price that the planet and its other inhabitants have paid for humankind's triumphant progress.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a book bound to appear on a large number of coffee tables and favorite lists, and be picked up even by those who normally would not find the time for reading. It will certainly not be the next A Brief History of Time, which is often named as the world's top unfinished popular bestseller. Both A Brief History of Time and Sapiens share a similar, worthy ...
Sapiens
Sapiens - a critical review. I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting.
a book review by Robert Davis: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Although designed for a popular audience Sapiens is also for the new student of the broadest history imaginable. The accidental as well as the deliberate reader will have to think—and that means much in the 21st century. Robert S. Davis is an award-winning senior professor of genealogy, geography, and history.
Book Review: 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' by Yuval Noah
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. By Yuval Noah Harari. HarperCollins, 443 pages, $29.99. Religion provided early versions of the human story: Zoroastrian sacred texts, the Book of Genesis ...
SAPIENS
The book was originally published in Israel in 2011 and became a best-seller. There is enormous gratification in reading books of this nature, an encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view. As Harari firmly believes, history ...
Book Review: 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind'
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, was first published in the U.S. in 2015, and it took the country by storm. It quickly became a New York Times best seller and is used in numerous history courses around the country. ... Book Review: 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' - a story of where we came from and ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Some academic historians have been quite critical of Sapiens by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, pointing out that some of the nuances of debates are lost in a popular history book.But that's also why it makes a good read and an effective audiobook.
Yuval Noah Harari Gives the Really Big Picture
The book, published in Hebrew as "A Brief History of Humankind," became an Israeli best-seller; then, as "Sapiens," it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Hebrew: קיצור תולדות האנושות, Qitzur Toldot ha-Enoshut) is a book by Yuval Noah Harari, first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011 based on a series of lectures Harari taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in English in 2014. The book, focusing on Homo sapiens, surveys the history of humankind, starting from the Stone Age ...
Book Review: Yuval Noah Harrari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Written in vivid language with memorable turns of phrase, Sapiens is a chronicle that captures the genealogy of our civilization from the perspective of three historical movements: the Cognitive Revolution about 70,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago, and the Scientific Revolution about 500 years ago. For Harari, each of these revolutions enabled our human ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Book Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a book by Yuval Noah Harari first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011, and in English in 2014. The book surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century ...
Book Review: "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah
It's an excellent book I'm happy to talk about. Harari is on the younger side of the scholarly world, barely 40 years old now, which is a year after the book's initial publication and certainly years after he started work on it. He is a gifted thinker and writer, with a clear, wise voice and a descriptive, logical style that seems timeless.
Book Review: Yuval Noah Harrari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. By Yuval Noah Harrari. Toronto, ON, Canada: McLelland and Stewart. 2014. 464 pp. ISBN 978-0771038501. Hardcover, $37.50 ... A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical TheologyBook Review book-review2020 Book Review. Book Review 129 The first of the revolutions, the Cognitive Revolution, was sparked by the ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' by Yuval Noah Harari (Harper) The Cognitive Revolution arose from the evolution of the massive human brain. Harari ponders the considerable energy cost of maintaining such an expensive thinking organ and the concomitant atrophy of our physical strength compared with other primates'.
Book review: Sapiens: A brief history of humankind
Book review: Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Dirk Lindebaum View all authors and affiliations. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, Harvill Secker: London, 2014. ... Book Review: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar. Figures and tables Figures & Media Tables. View Options.
Book Review: Sapiens (A Brief History of Humankind) by Yuval Noah
The book has 20 chapters that chronologically lay out the history and struggles of homo sapiens starting from the biological origins of the humans and ending in the present days.
Book Review
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is definitely one of those books. It was published in English in 2014 and has barely been out of the bestseller lists since.
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Review of Harari's "Sapiens" by Paul F. Ross Harari invests this work in speculations about how ideas shape the course of human history. If you enjoy the imagination of the novelist, if you enjoy a romp in the sandbox of ideas, if you seek the speculations of the philosopher, you may enjoy this pretend review of the history of humankind.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
His books have been translated into 65 languages, with 45 million copies sold worldwide. 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' (2014) looked deep into our past, 'Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow' (2016) considered far-future scenarios, and '21 Lessons for the 21st Century' (2018) zoomed in on the biggest questions of the present moment.
Pina Porceddu (Atlanta, GA)'s review of Sapiens: A Brief History of
Pina Porceddu's Reviews > Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. ... Clear rating. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by. Yuval Noah Harari. Pina Porceddu 's review Mar 29, 2024 ... I am glad I got the book but isn't probably something I would read again. I would prefer to ...
Summary and Analysis of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval
Now a #1 New Release on AmazonYuval Noah Harari's #1 New York Times Bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."WHY BUY THIS BOOK: Save time by reading this summarySave money by buying this summaryGain more in-depth knowledgeABOUT THE ORIGINAL BOOK: A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark ZuckerbergFrom a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative ...
These 5 Books Can Give You More Than a College Degree
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari "Sapiens" is a grand narrative of human history. It takes readers on an epic journey through the annals of human evolution ...
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah ...
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" audiobook summary offers a concise yet profound exploration of Yuval Noah Harari's groundbreaking work on the journey of Homo Sapiens. This audio guide captures the essence of Harari's narrative, focusing on the pivotal revolutions that have shaped human histo…
Book review: Sapiens: A brief history of humankind
Book review: Sapiens: A brief history of humankind Dirk Lindebaum View all authors and affiliations Based on : Harari Yuval Noah, Sapiens: A brief history of humankind , Harvill Secker: London, 2014.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind 9780062316110
Goodwill of Tacoma presents ... Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Title: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. ISBN-13: 9780062316110. Features: New York Times Bestseller now available as a beautifully packaged paperback. A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.