- Goodreads: 4.17-star average rating, more than 87,400 ratings
- Amazon: 4.6-star average rating, more than 4,260 reviews
“While his previous best sellers, Sapiens and Homo Deus, covered the past and future respectively, his new book is all about the present,” wrote Bill Gates in a recommendation for the third in Harari’s Sapiens series. “The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying,” Gates wrote. “It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them.” The collection of essays and advice on facing the current century.
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Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.
Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapiens’
- Goodreads: 4.42-star average rating, nearly 500,000 reviewers
- Amazon: 4.6-star average rating, more than 26,600 reviewers
Published originally in 2011 in Israel, where the historian lives with his husband Itzik Yahav, the book quickly garnered international acclaim after its re-release under the title “Sapiens” in 2015. Harari tells the story of humankind as it relates both to deeply seeded past events and origins, and neatly tied throughout (in conversational language and frequent wit) to our current affairs. “Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives,” summarized Ian Parker in the New Yorker, “even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility.”
I’ve personally read the book three times since it released in 2015, but a few global thinkers have also publicly lauded it. Former President Barack Obama recommended it in 2016 alongside Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad.” Bill Gates recommended it the same year, noting “It’s so provocative and raises so many questions about human history that I knew it would spark great conversations around the dinner table. It didn’t disappoint. In fact, in the weeks since we’ve been back from our holiday, we still talk about Sapiens.”
