Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
It took me almost eight months to finish reading ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ by Yuval Noah Harari. A timeline that feels both like praise and an indictment of the book. Praise, because it’s the kind of non-fiction that’s broken into small, self-contained chapters, making it easy to dip in and out without committing to a long reading streak. In that sense, ‘Sapiens’ reads almost like a short-story collection: you finish a chapter, step away, and return weeks later without feeling lost. Yet, except for some really interesting sections, it can also get pretty bland in between.
Sapiens is divided into four parts spanning twenty chapters, opening with “The Cognitive Revolution,” where Yuval Noah Harari rewinds history to remind us that our species once existed as an “animal of no significance”. At over 500 pages, the book may not seem brief, yet it ambitiously attempts to compress more than a millennium of human history into a single volume.
For some readers, this scope will feel like a remarkable intellectual feat; for others, it may come across as highly selective, an exercise in cherry-picking examples to explain what propelled the wheels of history forward, filtered through the lens of one historian. Some of Harari’s theories may not sit comfortably with everyone. For instance, he suggests that prehistoric humans might have (emphasis on maybe) led happier lives, unburdened by rigid social structures, laws, nine-to-five routines, debt, bills, and the modern anxieties that accompany them.
However, these observations, or well ‘opinions’ are rare in the book, otherwise Harari sticks to pointing facts from the past and established theories. So lots of sections in the ‘Sapiens’ read like “some historians says this, but others think that”.
Early on, for instance, the book presents two competing ideas about how Homo sapiens ended up as the only surviving human species. One suggests we outright replaced other humans like the Neanderthals, while the other argues there was far more mingling and interbreeding than we like to admit. Harari doesn’t really pick a side, although, genocide isn’t new to our race is it? (As in it’s likely Homo Sapiens might’ve wiped out the others, just like a lot of other species)
Covering everything from early human evolution to landmark revolutions such as the Agricultural and French revolutions, Sapiens examines history through a wide lens, simplifying complex ideas while encouraging readers to rethink what they take for granted. The chapters exploring the spread of religions, and the reasons some belief systems survived while others disappeared, stand out as some of the book’s most thought-provoking sections, helping explain why ‘Sapiens’ is now frequently cited in historical discourse.
Perhaps the book’s most memorable insight comes from its discussion of money, framed as a belief system in itself, the most successful trust mechanism humans have ever invented. Harari articulates this argument cleverly in the following passage:
“For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.”
Well, much has already been said and written about ‘Sapiens’ by experts far more qualified than me, so I won’t ramble on and on with my review. If you’re a bit like a rookie when it comes to non-fiction books about history of the world, this is an interesting place to start. It might get boring in parts, but is wonderfully brilliant in others.
Rating for ‘Sapiens’: 3 on 5 stars.
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