Book Cover

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.

# Review

I have finally read this book that everyone is raving about, the history of all humanity. This incredibly ambitious work is by an Israeli historian, and to be honest, I wasn’t too sure what to expect when reading this. The book covers all 100,000 years relevant to humanity’s existence. Harari divides the timespan into four major parts: the Cognitive Revolution (~70,000 BCE), the Agricultural Revolution (~10,000 BCE), the unification of humankind (34 CE), and the Scientific Revolution (1543 BCE). Harari weaves an engaging and cohesive narrative throughout all four sections.

Harari’s writing is very academic but very engaging. He clearly communicates complex ideas with grace and almost in a poetic manner. While he does offer differing theories upon major factors to modern humanity, such as the disappearance of the Neanderthals (the Replacement vs Interbreeding debate), these occurrences are rare and in most cases Harari assumes his theory is the truth without exploring and comparing other relevant theories. Some of Harari’s theories, such as his analysis of the Agricultural Revolution on the well-being of humans, is also very questionable.

It was very difficult narrowing down the takeaways as there was so much content packed into this book, but here are three of my chief takeaways:

• The human growth curve is very exponential, with much of human progress occurring in the last couple thousands of years. This is especially true with regards to the technological aspects of our world, where the progress occurred in the last couple hundreds of years. It’s hard to predict where humanity will be in the next couple hundreds of years, especially with new and exciting technologies being developed such as AI.

• Language is perhaps one of the most important aspects of what it means to be human. With language humans are able to communicate and exchange ideas, namely those pertaining to myths. Harari defines myth more broadly as ideas that people collectively believe in, be it a religion or a corporation. Due to the fact that humans can collectively believe in intangible ideas, they are able to organize and cooperate without having to rely on intimate personal connections.

• Happiness is subjective and some people are biologically wired to experience more “happiness” than others. Happiness is a moving target, humans tend to adjust to higher standards of life and their happiness levels normalize. Basing happiness on internal metrics is probably a better idea than basing it on external factors. People tend to be the happiest when their personal narrative meshes with those of people around them, which gives life meaning and allows happiness in the conviction of meaning.

# Conclusion

While the book does overpromise, it was to be expected; the book was very entertaining to read.

# Overall rating: 8.2

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