Sapiens Book Review

Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind (Yuval Noah Harari)

Wow – I thought this was an amazing read, so epic in scope (the whole history of human kind with some future musing at the end). Obviously you can’t cover all history in a single book (or not one I would finish) so he concentrates on four revolutions, cognitive, agricultural, scientific and industrial. 

It’s the first one that sets the tone of the rest of the book – our ability to create imagined worlds has really brought us to this place of technology, huge co-operation and over population (i.e. religion, money, nations, companies etc).

Yual has a knack for zooming in and out the perspective, giving delightful tiny anecdotes from history then the bigger picture of how these driving forces work. It’s thought provoking stuff which made me look at the modern world in a very different way. The anecdotes need to be light hearted as the bigger picture painted is bleak – basically we’re killing the planet as we know it.

Not that we’ve intentionally set out to do so – the narrative makes clear it’s a series of unintended consequences, a once the genie out of the bottle type of situation, so nostalgic remedies are unlikely to work. The end of the book really concentrates of what the next revolution might bring. The reflections on happiness seemed to me out of place compared to the tone of the rest of the book but again it made me wonder what type of measure of progress is meaningful to use.

Overall I was left with the impression that nothing stays the same for very long, more so these days. How / if we will cope with the existing problems and what the future holds will be fascinating.  

If you’re interested in Yuval Noah Harari's ideas here’s a link to his Ted talks:
https://www.ted.com/speakers/yuval_noah_harari