Table of Content
However, everything started to go downhill from somewhere in the middle of Part II. From an eager and excited reader I slowly became pissed off, disappointed and struggled to finish. I had several problems that plagued my reading experience and I plan to exemplify them below. Wonder at how far we've come in just a few millennia; wonder at all the twisting roads of history; wonder at where we could possibly end up.
Well, I was already annoyed with all the cute phrases and the prolific use of "!" at the end of 20% of the sentences (OK, I am exaggerating but seriously, a "history" book shouldn't use the exclamation point says the snob reviewer). But when the author sets up an argument about where we should be headed as a human race, he then goes off on bizarre tangents about cyber technology and refers to an obscure Project Gilgamesh . I felt that the last chapter just came out of nowhere and made absolutely no sense. Perhaps, as other reviews here on GR have suspected, no one actually reads this book, preferring to leave it unsullied on their coffee table as a prop to their showoff intellectualism. I've read a few of these "brief history of the world" books, most notably A History of the World in 100 Objects and Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. I liked both, but neither is as engaging as this book.
Homo sapiens
Early modern humans were adapted to life in the tropics but by 40,000 years ago they occupied a range of environments across the continents of Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia. Within the last 20,000 years humans have also spread into the Americas. Today, our culture and technology allows us to live in most environments on our planet as well as some off our planet. Sapiens focuses on key processes that shaped humankind and the world around it, such as the advent of agriculture, the creation of money, the spread of religion and the rise of the nation state. Unlike other books of its kind, Sapiens takes a multi-disciplinary approach that bridges the gaps between history, biology, philosophy and economics in a way never done before.
To ask other readers questions aboutSapiens,please sign up. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. HOMO SAPIENS is an ode to humanity as seen from a possible future scenario. HOMO SAPIENS is a film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence and the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being.
Books by Yuval Noah Harari
The demands on our attention are more immediate and all consuming. Even when we relax, we are not really relaxed. Faster and more efficient doesn’t necessarily equate to making anyone, but the people making the enormous amounts of money at the top, any happier.
An additional 21 skeletons were found in the same cave. Animal hide clothing may have been worn in cooler areas, although direct evidence of clothing only exists for the last 30,000 years. This evidence includes specialised tools such as needles; adornments such as buttons and beads sewn onto clothing; and the remains of animals, such as arctic foxes and wolves, that indicate they were trapped for their fur.
Preview — Sapiens
The benefit of reading both has been that I got to see ‘evidence’ from the past, even when it is pretty much the exact same evidence, being used to justify significantly different conclusions. If you are tossing up whether or not to read this one, I would probably recommend reading The Patterning Instinct instead. Not least because, I think it covers the non-Western philosophies and spiritual traditions it discusses much more on their own terms than this one does. It also covers them in ways that make you feel, even though the Patterning’s author provided merely a thumbnail sketch of each, that it is a sketch of the philosophy itself. This one made me feel I was being presented an ‘example’ rather than a ‘sketch’ – with the history of humans being presented much more as a kind of story that leads to us in the West as the culmination. That is, I came away from tins one thinking of Said’s Orientalism, feeling that this was a white guy explaining other-people’s-cultures – which might even have been true of the patterning book too, but that one felt more inclusive.
Physical prowess is inversely proportional to social power in most societies. He explores various theories, but none of them are very compelling. Harari compares the Code of Hammurabi with the American Declaration of Independence.
The book starts out alright was the hunter-gatherer civilizations are discussed in some detail and without focusing exclusively on North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Harari's chapters here did make for decent reading about the concept the author calls the cognitive revolution which separates us from other animals. Unfortunately, the next section about the agricultural revolution is a bit too polemical. Yes, it was a radical change and yes it did lead to new problems , but without it, the human species would likely have never evolved to the point of me typing this text on my laptop and you reading it in a browser. There are not parallel paths proposed, just a vague condemnation of agriculture before he takes on the subject of religions. Here, he talks of the evolution of monotheism from the polytheistic systems that abounded before.
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. True, there were some drawbacks, Harari reluctantly agrees. Although some lucky souls made it longer, life expectancy averaged only 30 to 40 years.
This discovery led to farming and herding animals, activities that transformed Earth’s natural landscapes—first locally, then globally. As humans invested more time in producing food, they settled down. Villages became towns, and towns became cities. With more food available, the human population began to increase dramatically. Our species had been so successful that it has inadvertently created a turning point in the history of life on Earth.
It’s been almost three years since I joined Goodreads and this is literally the second non-fiction book I finished reading. The last time I read a non-fiction book was in December 2016, it was an autobiography titled In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park. I don’t even know how to rate and review this book because it always made me feels awkward to give a rating to a non-fiction work, especially if it’s an autobiography, which luckily this book is not. Please remember that my rating—as always—speaks mostly for my reading enjoyment, not the technicality of the book. So this was a great read, full of interesting facts and ideas, with the potential to change how you view the human race and its history. There were some good explanations of why we are as we are and how things developed, Such as human conversation evolving so we could gossip about our fellow tribes people.
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