lena_kellogg 's review for:

Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

2.0

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I had high hopes for this book and was solidly let down. This is my first time reading Harari, and I cannot dispute that he's a phenomenal nonfiction writer. Unfortunately, I found that this book did not live up to its premise. Only about 60% of the way through do we really start to dive into the "tomorrow" portion of this book's subtitle "A History of Tomorrow." And only in the last 10% does he actually make predictions or explore where the future is heading in depth. I found many of the smaller concepts Harari presented fascinating and thought-provoking. The most fascinating to me was his argument on economic growth as a religion. I felt he spent so much time setting up for the "tomorrow" section that by the time we got there his conclusions and arguments felt hasty and half-baked. He jumps to wild conclusions with little to no nuance. Harari's tone takes a superior stance over the reader. He speaks as though he is not a homo sapien, but because he has destroyed all of the misconceptions homo sapiens have about ourselves and our society in this book that he is above reproach. At around the 80% mark I felt this tone came to head, and it almost made me DNF it so late in the game. In the last few pages he backtracks on his original premise and tells the reader that he hopes this book has opened our mind to new possibilities and creativity for the human race by breaking down every misconception we have about ourselves. He also explicitly states this book was not meant to provide forecasts on the future, just to open our minds to its possibilities.
Overall, I'm not unhappy to have read it. And truthfully I'll probably give Sapiens a shot. But I could never recommend this book to someone when all the concepts I felt were interesting and resonated with me could have been summed up in a review shorter than this one.