Let’s clear a few things first, before you think of bashing me up. This is a commendable effort by Mr. Harari to summarize the whole history of mankind and its evolutionary tale. During the initial pages, I too thought that this will be one of the best reads on anthropology. But this book promises a lot only to deceive. We statisticians use the term confirmation bias, which means the tendency to favor and present only those information that are supportive to one’s beliefs. This book is full of them. Harari had decided to present all that is wicked and weak about Homo Sapiens and he has succeeded to a large extent.
Not that I am complaining. I for one have never held the notion that we humans are special beings sitting atop the food chain, placed there by a favorable god who created us all in his (or, is it a ‘her’?) own image. I think of us as a different species of apes that managed to evolve a little quicker than our cousins. Despite our use of advanced languages, costly clothes and snazzy gadgets, internally we remain the beasts that roamed the vast forests once. I see nothing special about being human. This book helped cement that belief in my mind by discussing the idiocies and idiosyncrasies of our species as a whole.
But that’s just about it. This book isn’t ‘a brief history of humankind’, but the opinions of Mr. Harari about the various aspects of human evolution. This isn’t a chronological history in the lines of ‘What on Earth Happened?’ by Christopher Lloyd or ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson, both of which I found to be far more informative and interesting than this one. This is both a philosophical take and passing of judgments by Mr. Harari on what he considers to be the vital cogs of human evolution, namely Cognitive Revolution, Agricultural Revolution & Scientific Revolution. There is nothing that you end up learning that you already didn’t learn, especially in case you had read those two aforementioned books.
Sorry, dear friends. I have read much better books. 2.5 stars!
