Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Rating: 5.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2017-04-02
This book covers a lot: prehistory through the present, including technology, politics, religion and economics (turns out they’re all related). It does a really good job of making connections between events that are far apart geographically or in time, tying history together into a set of narratives. It’s full of arguments I had never considered. But it’s careful to give counter-arguments and and multiple theories. By the end, I felt like I had gotten a dozen history courses in one, with all the details distilled into broad themes.
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On second reading, I really appreciated the dry sense of humor.
“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
“[Consumerism] is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.”
“Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’.”
“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”