Last year, Harari’s follow-up, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, was published in the UK, becoming another bestseller. No one saw international stardom beckoning. The story goes that the major Israeli publishers weren’t interested. Apparently, Sapiens is based on an introductory course to world history that Harari had to teach, after senior colleagues dodged the task. Yet the author of this accomplished and far-reaching book is a young Israeli historian whose career, up until that point, had been devoted to the relative academic backwater of medieval military history. It ranges across a multitude of disciplines with seemingly effortless scholarship, bringing together a keen understanding of history, anthropology, zoology, linguistics, philosophy, theology, economics, psychology, neuroscience and much else besides. Originally published in Hebrew in 2011, the book was translated into English three years later and became an international bestseller. Religions, nations and money, Harari argues, are all human fictions that have enabled collaboration and organisation on a massive scale. The irony, perhaps, is that one of the book’s warnings is that we are in danger of becoming an elite-dominated global society.Īt the centre of the book is the contention that what made Homo sapiens the most successful human being, supplanting rivals such as Neanderthals, was our ability to believe in shared fictions. Barack Obama and Bill Gates have undergone that experience, as have many others in the Davos crowd and Silicon Valley. It’s one of those books that can’t help but make you feel smarter for having read it. People shouldn’t be focused on the question of how to stop technological progress because this is impossible Perhaps, but it is an intellectual joy to be swept along. Although Sapiens has been widely and loudly praised, some critics have suggested that it is too sweeping. It is a dazzlingly bold introduction, which the remainder of the book lives up to on almost every page.
0 kommentar(er)
