heatherdbooks 's review for:

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

3.0

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After Sapiens, I found this book disappointing. The chapters weren't really "lessons". The first section of the book was quite sobering with the description how rapidly infotech and biotech are changing the world and the threats to humans (inequality, irrelevance for a substantial part of the population). The middle sections (Political Challenge/Despair and Hope) were muddied, mostly rambles about the trouble with nationalism and religions. The Truth section included interesting discussion on ignorance and the observation that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. The last section (Resilience) makes the good point that education needs to change to help deal with too much information, but the Meaning chapter again becomes a rambling meander of the shortcoming of the stories told by religions/nationalism. The overarching recommendations seems to be to know oneself (to keep ahead of big data), and meditation can help.

Harari makes some interesting points & asks good questions but the delivery was just okay.