Sapiens
6 people have this book on the record — 5 of 7 verdicts positive. The dissent stays on the page.
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
on contraptions.venkateshrao.com · 17 Jun 2023
Depending on your mood, either The Sovereign Individual, Sapiens, Siddhartha, Total Freedom (JK), The Untethered Soul, or the Rational Optimist. Books are cheap, buy all and skim them for the one that grabs you.
on X · 22 Dec 2017
I resisted reading this popular history of mankind, because it came out when I had just finished “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches”, on the same subject. But wow - this book is at its best when the author is sharing his personal perspective about binding myths, humanism, and other ways that “truths” are not true. And you get an interesting history of the world along wi…
on sive.rs · 15 Aug 2017
Melinda and I loved Harari’s previous book, Sapiens, which tries to explain how our species came to dominate the Earth.
on gatesnotes.com · 22 May 2017
Still, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human history.
on gatesnotes.com · 17 May 2016
The history of humankind from 2 million years back all the way until today. Fascinating read. I liked that it wasn’t just a list of events, but an overarching “theory of history”. Also enjoyed that this one topic was presented through many lenses: history, evolutionary biology, archeology, economics, even philosophy and theology.
on radex.io · 1 Jan 2016
Yuval Harari, Sapiens. Read half of it, then lost interest. I'm ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, it provides a useful, somewhat contrarian perspective on human history. (For example: the agricultural revolution probably sucked for the people who went through it.) On the other hand, it's full of sweeping pronouncements that I can't fully endorse.