BOOK 189: SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND: YUVAL NOAH HARARI
This 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 our own species of human, Homo sapiens. The account is situated within a framework provided by the natural sciences, particularly evolutionary biology.
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 our own species of human, Homo sapiens. He divides the history of Sapiens into four major parts:
The Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 BC, when Sapiens evolved imagination).
The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BC, the development of agriculture).
The unification of humankind (the gradual consolidation of human political organisations towards one global empire).
The Scientific Revolution (c. 1500 AD, the emergence of objective science).
Public reception
First published in Hebrew in 2011 and then in English in 2014, the book was translated into 45 languages (as of June 2017). It also made to The New York Times best-seller list and won the National Library of China's Wenjin Book Award for the best book published in 2014. Writing four years after its English-language publication, Alex Preston wrote in The Guardianthat Sapiens had become a "publishing phenomenon" with "wild success" symptomatic of a broader trend toward "intelligent, challenging nonfiction, often books that are several years old". Concurrently, The Guardian listed the book as among the ten "best brainy books of the decade".
Scholarly reception
Anthropologist Christopher Robert Hallpike reviewed the book and did not find any "serious contribution to knowledge". Hallpike suggested that "...whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously". He considered it an infotainment publishing event offering a "wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny."
Science journalist Charles C. Mann concluded in The Wall Street Journal, "There’s a whiff of dorm-room bull sessions about the author’s stimulating but often unsourced assertions."
Reviewing the book in The Washington Post, evolutionary anthropologist Avi Tuschman points out problems stemming from the contradiction between Harari's "freethinking scientific mind" and his "fuzzier worldview hobbled by political correctness", but nonetheless wrote that "Harari’s book is important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens."
Reviewing the book in The Guardian, philosopher Galen Strawson concluded that among several other problems, "Much of Sapiens is extremely interesting, and it is often well expressed. As one reads on, however, the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism."
Reviewing the book in The New Atlantis, John Sexton, graduate student at the University of Chicago, concluded that "The book is fundamentally unserious and undeserving of the wide acclaim and attention it has been receiving".
MY VERDICT: I found this book entertaining and interesting. Despite some negative reviews from scholars, I found some fascinating theories that I previously had not heard of and some of Harari’s viewpoints were thought provoking. There is a lot of information to digest and I forgot most of the history at the start by the time I got to the end, which is more to do with my memory than a fault of the book. I did feel that the last chapter prophesized too much and continued on a bit too long but overall I enjoyed it.
