Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind - Book Review
So what makes this book readable?
or perhaps
why should you read this book?
To read 462 pages of non-fiction - about the history of our species “Homo sapiens” - in a 5 days time among with the mundane routine activities, for a lazy reader, such as me ( Who has more than a dozen half-read books with forgotten bookmarks, dating back upto a decade) isn't easy.
To write something of this magnitude requires a lot of homework; Reading from ancient archaeological scripts and stone carvings; Decoding and deciphering the language of the past and lost empires; Observing and guessing the patterns of history and trying to inculcate in the present scenario and an attempt at torching the infernos of the unpredictable future.
All these can be done and are in-fact found in essays and texts of various subjects around the globe. But why would you purchase a textbook for your leisure reading, unless you are specialist or a historian like Yuval Noah Harari, who happens to be the author!
But Yuval Noah Harari does it with ease and brings to our hands, a palatable and relishing read. He surprises you with astonishing facts, tantalizing tales and storming stories in a book, otherwise categorized as non-fiction. The book is so intriguing to keep it aside, as we are knowing about ourselves; About the history of how we bagged the most cruelest animal title in the universe. Some would argue “the smartest” and drag in Darwin’s “Survival of the fittest” theory for their sakes. But what was the hefty price we paid up to attach ourselves to that tag “the fittest” or “the smartest” or “the cruelest”
How many species have we wiped out of the ecosystem, including Neanderthals!
How many genocides have we masterminded knowingly or unknowingly!
How many billions of creatures have we tormented and still continue to do!
How Wheat domesticated us and not the vice versa, as we think!
Who else would have the audacity to call the agricultural revolution as the biggest fraud of mankind or the modern industrial revolution as the greatest crime of mankind?
How Gossiping helped in our cognitive evolution!
How we are guilty as an ecological serial killer!
How we came to live under the imagined reality of Gods, Nations and corporates!
How our self made laws and norms turned some people into slaves and others to masters!
How the dark side of money has made the world, a big and rather heartless marketplace!
How, the monotheist religions, even though being more fanatic and missionary, have become more successful than their polytheist counterparts!
How communism is no less than a religion than Islam!
How capitalism is actually good and the capitalistic greed is not!
How we have fallen prey to romanticism, consumerism and shopping!
How the evils of the modern world, Money, Imperialism, Religion unified the human race, ironically!
How in the name of culture, we forbade a spectrum of possibilities, which our biology enabled!
How “culturism" has replaced the old villain, “Racism”, in modern times!
How the modern economy broke our traditional values of family and made us independent and lonely!
And at the final chapters, he raises the most important question, “ were we happy, all along?” or “are we happy now, being the smartest species in the universe?”
This might look like a serious book, but we are a serious species. It requires so.
From “an animal of no significance” to “the animal that became a God”, we evolved. This book is about the exhilarating journey, our great ancestors forayed into the unknown, into Us.
Just in case, our “fittest” species, gets wiped out by a mega asteroid (like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs) or a genocide by a super smart breed of cyborgs (like we eradicated the neanderthals), what would happen to our glorious species?
The future species will try to research on our bones and fossils, the language we used, the money we lavishly spent, the culture we acquired, the imagined orders we lived under..
I would recommend them to dig this book, unscathed from the ruins and try to decipher the meaning, to know about Us!
Comments