Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by jkanownik
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
4.0
First off I highly recommend the physical book over the audio book. The framing of the sections and chapters is easily lost in audio book format and it loses important structure. The book probably works best read in succession with his earlier books but is also fine to read first. New readers will get lost in the beginning where there is a heavy dose of futurist speculation. That quickly passes and you can always go back and read Homo Deus later.
My review of the content of the book itself is very similar to Harari's earlier work in Sapiens and Homo Deus. This book will make you think and it is worth reading for that reason alone. At the same time it feels incomplete due to leaving many hanging threads that are not explored. It repeats speculation over and over without justifying the reliance on it. And it misses important additional points for the topics it explores. It is not clear if they are intentionally ignored for simplification or glaring omissions. The final issue for some readers will be that the book doesn't have many answers. If Homo Deus bummed you out this book will likely leave you depressed.
I was not bummed out by Homo Deus though. This book left me with the same positive feeling. There are no easy answers and the future will require hard work. It is a call to action that provides tools to guide that action to where it can be most impactful. It tears down the mythical liberal democracy as an ethereal concept and leaves stable pillars to build off of. Nationalism is not suited to handle global problems. Democracy beat communism and autocracies due to superior information processing, but technology is allowing communism and autocracies to process information much more efficiently. Knowing ourselves is a critical step in the fight for a future that will likely get scarier before we get through it. We need more trust, humility and a lot more cross-discipline cohesion to make a world without a true objective truth work.
My review of the content of the book itself is very similar to Harari's earlier work in Sapiens and Homo Deus. This book will make you think and it is worth reading for that reason alone. At the same time it feels incomplete due to leaving many hanging threads that are not explored. It repeats speculation over and over without justifying the reliance on it. And it misses important additional points for the topics it explores. It is not clear if they are intentionally ignored for simplification or glaring omissions. The final issue for some readers will be that the book doesn't have many answers. If Homo Deus bummed you out this book will likely leave you depressed.
I was not bummed out by Homo Deus though. This book left me with the same positive feeling. There are no easy answers and the future will require hard work. It is a call to action that provides tools to guide that action to where it can be most impactful. It tears down the mythical liberal democracy as an ethereal concept and leaves stable pillars to build off of. Nationalism is not suited to handle global problems. Democracy beat communism and autocracies due to superior information processing, but technology is allowing communism and autocracies to process information much more efficiently. Knowing ourselves is a critical step in the fight for a future that will likely get scarier before we get through it. We need more trust, humility and a lot more cross-discipline cohesion to make a world without a true objective truth work.