There are some non-fiction books that I often see on friend’s shelves that I think they have convinced themselves they will someday read but never get around to reading (I’m guilty of a few of these books on my shelf). I think for a lot of people, Sapiens is one of those books. It’s an immensely popular book and I think for that reason alone it has been bought and recommended many times without being read! I think it’s a great place to start for anyone interested in history!
Sapiens and Harari’s other books including Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Nexus have sold over 55 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 65 languages. And like most books that are popular, they have become that way for a reason! His books distill huge ideas into easy to read stories, they aren’t slow or dry and are a great starting point for their topics and have an interesting take. If you’re interested in human history, biology or technology I would encourage you to find the time to sit down and read one of his books. And Sapiens is a great place to start!
Who is Yuval Noah Harari?
Harari is an Israeli historian who earned his doctorate at Oxford studying military history. He is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is international breakthrough, Sapiens, took on a slightly bigger subject than war… the history of our entire species.
Sapiens was originally published in 2011 in Hebrew and was actually based on a series of lectures he gave to an undergraduate history class.. It wasn’t until 2014 when it was released in English that it started to gain worldwide traction. I think what made it so popular so quickly is how different it feels to other non-fiction books. Most history books tell you what happened e.g. dates, facts, names etc. whereas Harari asks why things happened and he definitely has strong opinions that make his books read more like a good dinner conversation… He argues homo sapiens conquered the world not because we are stronger or smarter individually, but because we can cooperate flexibly in massive numbers through storytelling. Stories that only work because so many of us agree to believe in them together.
An interesting anecdote about him is his commitment to meditation which he practises for at least two hours per day. He also takes 30 days or more each year to go away and spend time in silence with no books or social media.. For someone with strong views on technology and what the future will look like, Yuval doesn’t even own a smartphone!
Which Harari book should you start with?
Hard not to say Sapiens. It begins when Homo sapiens was one human species among several. It travels very quickly through 70,000 years of history and by the time you reach the invention of money and the age of empires and science, you will be questioning what exactly it was that led humans to dominate the planet and perhaps whether or not it was such a good thing after all!
If you’re always reading about or interested in AI, go straight to Nexus. Some of the best stories in this book about information are about the printing press. Printing made it easier to circulate scientific discoveries. It also made it easier to spread accusations of witchcraft. Keep that example in mind when Harari turns to the algorithms deciding what appears on your screen!
In the last chapters of Sapiens Yuval talks about what’s next for humanity and looks to the future. If that’s something you’re interested in, he had more to say and that’s what Homo Deus is all about. Harari turns from what humans have done to what we might choose to do next. Suppose medicine could extend a human life far beyond its usual span. Who would get access first? And what would happen if those people were already the ones with the most money and power? This is also listed as one of Richard Branson's must-read books!
If you like reading a chapter at a time, try 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Education, work, religion and the difficulty of keeping your bearings in a crowded news cycle all get a chapter. Start with the chapter on education if you’ve ever wondered what you’d teach a child today that will still be useful decades from now.
And for younger readers?
Sapiens: A Graphic History retells the story in comic form, with Harari himself turning up as a character. For a child, there is also Unstoppable Us which is the one book of his I haven’t read but you can get an idea of what it’s about by the first question it asks… A lion is stronger than you. Plenty of animals are faster. So how on earth did humans end up running the place?
Already read Harari? Try these next
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. Remember that wheat field? These two look at communities that took up farming, set it aside or organised themselves differently as the seasons changed. Read it after Sapiens for the pleasure of seeing another set of thinkers tackle the same evidence and tell a different story.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything. For anyone who loved the scale of Sapiens, Bryson goes bigger still. He wants to know how anyone figured out the age of the Earth in the first place, and the people who did the figuring are half the fun.
Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature. Wulf follows Alexander von Humboldt up mountains and across continents as he pieces together how climate, altitude and plant life fit together. A lovely next read if you enjoy big ideas and would like to spend a whole book in the company of the person who had one.
If Sapiens has been sitting on your shelf for a while, hopefully this is the nudge you need to pick it up! I didn’t agree with everything Harari had to say, but I still think about his take on money and how much of our lives depends on things we’ve all agreed to believe in.
That’s why Sapiens was the first book I put on my list of 20 Science Books That Changed How I See the World. If you’ve already read it and enjoyed it, there are another 19 there to keep you going!
