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A review by rbruehlman
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
2.0
I did not enjoy reading this book.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind really is better titled Yuval Noah Harari's Hot Take On Humans: A Soapbox Rant. Bill Gates' quote on the front would have you think this was a book about anthropology, but it's really not.
Strike one (yeah, we're doing strikes): To start with, the book won no favors with its writing style--no joke, it reminded me of reading 5th grade history books. Short sentences, simple vocabulary, and silly simplistic examples to drive home points that I didn't need help understanding. You don't need to write on the level of an elementary schooler to be easy to read and engaging. The writing style was grating.
Strike two: Wow, this dude Has Opinions. Harari very clearly has an idea of what "ideal" society should be, and really does not try very hard to hide this. Case in point: Harari's book starts out with explaining the different species of human, which was fine ... then it veered into the Agricultural Revolution. Harari LOVES hunter-gatherer societies, and he talks about it with extremely rosy terms, relative to agricultural societies. He waxes poetic about how food was plentiful and good, and the population was in balance, more intellectually stimulating, etc. Meanwhile, agrarian society meant people got less food, were unhealthier, lived a more boring lifestyle, etc. There are obviously benefits to hunting and gathering, but I'm not buying it was some utopian ideal he makes it out to be. If hunter-gathering was so great, why did a massive proportion of the world switch over to an agrarian society?
His logic for defending hunter-gather societies doesn't even really make sense. For instance, he claims hunting and gathering is ideal for keeping the population in balance--when times are hard, there are fewer children born because "the body adjusts hormonally," and when times are good, societies have more babies. Err, this is called starving to death for people who are alive, and/or not menstruating because you're malnourished. That's kind of how population control works. Women stop menstruating if they're underweight. No babies! Meanwhile, he says agrarian societies allowed for "population explosion," and therefore people got less food. Well, no, that's not how population explosions work. Populations explode because you have more food.
I don't have any objections to hunter-gatherer societies, but the Orwellian double-speak gave me uneasy feelings that Harari had an agenda on how society "should" be ... a feeling that never went away.
Strike three: Frustrating me further, I felt like Harari often made grand sweeping claims and generalizations with very little to back up his thought process. He'd drop metaphorical bombs and move on (and, mind you, Harari literally never cites sources, so you have no way of determining the veracity). But other times he would spend oodles of time expounding theories that just don't really hold water. For instance, he notes agriculture did not sprout from the Middle East and spread outward, but rather developed independently repeatedly by different societies (wow, almost like agriculture is useful?). I hadn't heard that hypothesis before, but that sounds reasonable. We know, for instance, that dogs were domesticated multiple times independently. In his exploration of why/how, he suggests wheat domesticated us (odd philosophical argument), but then also suggests perhaps agriculture got started because of religious worship. He uses Gobelki Tepe as an example--evidently, it was built before people there started harvesting wheat, so people perhaps built this a temple for religious purposes and then started harvesting wheat to sustain building it and working there. What? Perhaps that particular Gobelki Tepe temple came to be that way, but it's just one instance--is he suggesting that same process happened everywhere around the world multiple times? You can't build an entire theory off one society's temple. Come on.
Net net, his theories are often wild and poorly substantiated. I do happen to know a lot about early human history, so the obvious bullshit stuck out to me more there ... but the fact that the first third of the book was flimsy made me wonder how much I could trust sections of the book I knew less about.
Strike four against Harari--he often veers off-topic to go on soapbox diatribes about modern day issues that are only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Imma let you finish this section on early animal domestication, but let me first go on a long-winded tangent about how we treat animals today. I don't like how animals are treated in today's slaughterhouses either, but why is several pages expounding on current-day animal cruelty relevant to animal domestication several thousand years ago?
I often imagined Harari wasn't really writing a structured book, but instead was recording a stream of consciousness, like an angry old man who rambles, "That reminds me, it's also terrible that blah blah". Harari clearly has very strong opinions on modern-day society, and if he can't find a more appropriate place to rant about it (or even if he can), he rants about it in whatever section even marginally related to it, continuity and flow of the book be damned. His political views are not hard to discern, and I don't even disagree with them, but they feel obnoxiously shoe-horned in.
Strike five: Related to all the others, maybe not a separate strike, but still worth expounding upon: I just felt like Harari had really, really strong opinions about humanity. I frequently felt lectured to and moralized to. I didn't disagree with what Harari was saying at an intellectual level, but something about the tone just felt ... too much. And it slanted what he said. I felt like Harari frequently presented evidence and expounded on it in accordance with his world viewpoint, leaving aside contrary facts. Moreover, I think a lot of interesting topics in the book got comparative drive-by treatment sometimes and could have been explored further.
Those were the major strikes. Some less grave major problems, but still things that irked me...
Nitpick 1: I'm not saying this in a "woke" kind of way, but I felt like this book was more Eurocentric than it should have been. I remember taking a World Medieval History class my freshman year of college and just being blown away by how little I knew about the rest of the world, and how much more advanced other societies were relative to the Europeans. The Arabs led the world in science and medicine; China was miles ahead of innovation relative to the Europeans. The Africans had a robust trade empire. While I don't disagree that Europeans had an outsized impact on globalization the 1500s onward, I was expecting more emphasis on other civilizations. He does allude to the Arabs and Indians' mathematical achievements, but ... it felt a bit cursory.
Nitpick 2: I really wish he had included more sources, and embedded them into the text a little more. There are literally no sources listed anywhere in the text. I understand he includes some sources in the back of the book and a fuller list on his website, but ... meh. That is so divorced from the text. It forces you to take everything he says at face value.
Nitpick 3: The section on modern/future society, with gene editing and cyborgs and AI just felt ....... a little pie-in-the-sky. That was the section where he made the grandest sweeping claims. Everything and anything is possible in Harari's future. Some things he talked about, yes, they are absolutely underway, but he vastly oversimplifies their technical complexity; it will be decades, if not more, before many of the emerging scientific achievements he talks about are ready, and they will be imperfect when they finally do arrive. I could have used a little less bombastic exaggeration here. It's hard to take someone seriously when they say, "And we will soon be able to do [super insanely complicated thing]!" Soon according to whom? They said flying cars would be here soon, too. My POV on technology and the future: the major advances and disruptions we can predict are farther out than we think (see for reference self-driving cars), and the ones that massively change society are never widely featured or predicted (the internet, smartphones). It's hard to measure impact. I don't doubt humanity will change immensely over the coming decades, but it's crazy hard to say how concretely. Harari presents everything as concrete and imminent.
You might ask, well, what did you enjoy about the book? I did enjoy some things. I thought his exploration of imperialism was interesting from a philosophical perspective. I enjoyed learning about the imperialist expansion of Europe. I thought it was a interesting question to raise of whether we are happier, as well (I don't think we are). The book did provide food for thought sometimes and, when it stuck to the facts, could be engaging.
Overall, though, I didn't really feel like the book covered human history; it was, in large ways, a cursory summary of human society with a heavy dose of moralizing and Harari's thinly-disguised misanthropy. I think Harari would be happier if humankind was hunter-gatherers with a population size and impact on the planet akin to beavers or chimps. I don't think I disagree with Harari's viewpoints, necessarily, but I found the way they were presented extremely grating and holier-than-thou. I guess I felt lectured to a bit somehow?
Maybe the problem is me, for buying the book expecting it to cover something different. I thought it would be an interesting and breezy anthropology read with no good/bad moralizing and no opinions on how society should be--just the facts presented in a fun way. This book definitely wasn't that. I was less grated by the book when I finally gave up the expectation of what I thought it would be halfway through, accepting instead it was a mix of history and personal philosophy, but at no point did I enjoy it. Meh.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind really is better titled Yuval Noah Harari's Hot Take On Humans: A Soapbox Rant. Bill Gates' quote on the front would have you think this was a book about anthropology, but it's really not.
Strike one (yeah, we're doing strikes): To start with, the book won no favors with its writing style--no joke, it reminded me of reading 5th grade history books. Short sentences, simple vocabulary, and silly simplistic examples to drive home points that I didn't need help understanding. You don't need to write on the level of an elementary schooler to be easy to read and engaging. The writing style was grating.
Strike two: Wow, this dude Has Opinions. Harari very clearly has an idea of what "ideal" society should be, and really does not try very hard to hide this. Case in point: Harari's book starts out with explaining the different species of human, which was fine ... then it veered into the Agricultural Revolution. Harari LOVES hunter-gatherer societies, and he talks about it with extremely rosy terms, relative to agricultural societies. He waxes poetic about how food was plentiful and good, and the population was in balance, more intellectually stimulating, etc. Meanwhile, agrarian society meant people got less food, were unhealthier, lived a more boring lifestyle, etc. There are obviously benefits to hunting and gathering, but I'm not buying it was some utopian ideal he makes it out to be. If hunter-gathering was so great, why did a massive proportion of the world switch over to an agrarian society?
His logic for defending hunter-gather societies doesn't even really make sense. For instance, he claims hunting and gathering is ideal for keeping the population in balance--when times are hard, there are fewer children born because "the body adjusts hormonally," and when times are good, societies have more babies. Err, this is called starving to death for people who are alive, and/or not menstruating because you're malnourished. That's kind of how population control works. Women stop menstruating if they're underweight. No babies! Meanwhile, he says agrarian societies allowed for "population explosion," and therefore people got less food. Well, no, that's not how population explosions work. Populations explode because you have more food.
I don't have any objections to hunter-gatherer societies, but the Orwellian double-speak gave me uneasy feelings that Harari had an agenda on how society "should" be ... a feeling that never went away.
Strike three: Frustrating me further, I felt like Harari often made grand sweeping claims and generalizations with very little to back up his thought process. He'd drop metaphorical bombs and move on (and, mind you, Harari literally never cites sources, so you have no way of determining the veracity). But other times he would spend oodles of time expounding theories that just don't really hold water. For instance, he notes agriculture did not sprout from the Middle East and spread outward, but rather developed independently repeatedly by different societies (wow, almost like agriculture is useful?). I hadn't heard that hypothesis before, but that sounds reasonable. We know, for instance, that dogs were domesticated multiple times independently. In his exploration of why/how, he suggests wheat domesticated us (odd philosophical argument), but then also suggests perhaps agriculture got started because of religious worship. He uses Gobelki Tepe as an example--evidently, it was built before people there started harvesting wheat, so people perhaps built this a temple for religious purposes and then started harvesting wheat to sustain building it and working there. What? Perhaps that particular Gobelki Tepe temple came to be that way, but it's just one instance--is he suggesting that same process happened everywhere around the world multiple times? You can't build an entire theory off one society's temple. Come on.
Net net, his theories are often wild and poorly substantiated. I do happen to know a lot about early human history, so the obvious bullshit stuck out to me more there ... but the fact that the first third of the book was flimsy made me wonder how much I could trust sections of the book I knew less about.
Strike four against Harari--he often veers off-topic to go on soapbox diatribes about modern day issues that are only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Imma let you finish this section on early animal domestication, but let me first go on a long-winded tangent about how we treat animals today. I don't like how animals are treated in today's slaughterhouses either, but why is several pages expounding on current-day animal cruelty relevant to animal domestication several thousand years ago?
I often imagined Harari wasn't really writing a structured book, but instead was recording a stream of consciousness, like an angry old man who rambles, "That reminds me, it's also terrible that blah blah". Harari clearly has very strong opinions on modern-day society, and if he can't find a more appropriate place to rant about it (or even if he can), he rants about it in whatever section even marginally related to it, continuity and flow of the book be damned. His political views are not hard to discern, and I don't even disagree with them, but they feel obnoxiously shoe-horned in.
Strike five: Related to all the others, maybe not a separate strike, but still worth expounding upon: I just felt like Harari had really, really strong opinions about humanity. I frequently felt lectured to and moralized to. I didn't disagree with what Harari was saying at an intellectual level, but something about the tone just felt ... too much. And it slanted what he said. I felt like Harari frequently presented evidence and expounded on it in accordance with his world viewpoint, leaving aside contrary facts. Moreover, I think a lot of interesting topics in the book got comparative drive-by treatment sometimes and could have been explored further.
Those were the major strikes. Some less grave major problems, but still things that irked me...
Nitpick 1: I'm not saying this in a "woke" kind of way, but I felt like this book was more Eurocentric than it should have been. I remember taking a World Medieval History class my freshman year of college and just being blown away by how little I knew about the rest of the world, and how much more advanced other societies were relative to the Europeans. The Arabs led the world in science and medicine; China was miles ahead of innovation relative to the Europeans. The Africans had a robust trade empire. While I don't disagree that Europeans had an outsized impact on globalization the 1500s onward, I was expecting more emphasis on other civilizations. He does allude to the Arabs and Indians' mathematical achievements, but ... it felt a bit cursory.
Nitpick 2: I really wish he had included more sources, and embedded them into the text a little more. There are literally no sources listed anywhere in the text. I understand he includes some sources in the back of the book and a fuller list on his website, but ... meh. That is so divorced from the text. It forces you to take everything he says at face value.
Nitpick 3: The section on modern/future society, with gene editing and cyborgs and AI just felt ....... a little pie-in-the-sky. That was the section where he made the grandest sweeping claims. Everything and anything is possible in Harari's future. Some things he talked about, yes, they are absolutely underway, but he vastly oversimplifies their technical complexity; it will be decades, if not more, before many of the emerging scientific achievements he talks about are ready, and they will be imperfect when they finally do arrive. I could have used a little less bombastic exaggeration here. It's hard to take someone seriously when they say, "And we will soon be able to do [super insanely complicated thing]!" Soon according to whom? They said flying cars would be here soon, too. My POV on technology and the future: the major advances and disruptions we can predict are farther out than we think (see for reference self-driving cars), and the ones that massively change society are never widely featured or predicted (the internet, smartphones). It's hard to measure impact. I don't doubt humanity will change immensely over the coming decades, but it's crazy hard to say how concretely. Harari presents everything as concrete and imminent.
You might ask, well, what did you enjoy about the book? I did enjoy some things. I thought his exploration of imperialism was interesting from a philosophical perspective. I enjoyed learning about the imperialist expansion of Europe. I thought it was a interesting question to raise of whether we are happier, as well (I don't think we are). The book did provide food for thought sometimes and, when it stuck to the facts, could be engaging.
Overall, though, I didn't really feel like the book covered human history; it was, in large ways, a cursory summary of human society with a heavy dose of moralizing and Harari's thinly-disguised misanthropy. I think Harari would be happier if humankind was hunter-gatherers with a population size and impact on the planet akin to beavers or chimps. I don't think I disagree with Harari's viewpoints, necessarily, but I found the way they were presented extremely grating and holier-than-thou. I guess I felt lectured to a bit somehow?
Maybe the problem is me, for buying the book expecting it to cover something different. I thought it would be an interesting and breezy anthropology read with no good/bad moralizing and no opinions on how society should be--just the facts presented in a fun way. This book definitely wasn't that. I was less grated by the book when I finally gave up the expectation of what I thought it would be halfway through, accepting instead it was a mix of history and personal philosophy, but at no point did I enjoy it. Meh.