“A single-volume history of Homo sapiens from cognitive revolution to the present.”
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is Yuval Noah Harari's 2014 popular-history book (the original 2011 Hebrew edition, with the English translation appearing in 2014), the breakout work that turned an Israeli academic medievalist into one of the most-read popular-history writers in the world. Harari attempts a single-volume narrative history of Homo sapiens from the cognitive revolution roughly 70,000 years ago through the agricultural revolution, the scientific revolution, and into a near-future bio-engineered Homo deus. The argument is structured around the centrality of "shared fictions" (religion, nation-states, corporations, money) as the operational technology that allowed Homo sapiens to outcompete other hominid species and dominate the planet.
Harari's prose is the structural strength of the book and the reason it took off across an audience that does not normally read academic history. The chapters are short, the central concepts are crystallized into memorable phrases, and the long-arc historical argument is laid out with the kind of patient clarity most academic history withholds. The cost of that accessibility is the part Harari's academic critics have been pressing for ten years: the scientific-revolution and agricultural-revolution chapters cover ground in too few pages to do justice to the historiography, and the bio-engineered Homo deus speculation in the final third has aged in interesting ways. Read it as one ambitious argument by an interesting writer, not as the consensus academic history of humanity.
Recommended as required contemporary popular-history reading, as the right starting point for the book-club-and-podcast conversation Harari's work entered, and for fans of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Read Homo Deus (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) next, then the 2024 Nexus on AI. Four solid stars. The Derek Perkins audiobook is the definitive audio production.
Related reads
If you liked Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
The Devil in the White City
by Erik Larson
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson 2003 review. The 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer H. H. Holmes, whose hotel operated three blocks from the fairgrounds. The narrative-nonfiction bestseller that defined the contemporary popular-history register.
The Wager
by David Grann
The Wager by David Grann 2023 review. The 1741 shipwreck of HMS Wager off Patagonia and the two contradictory mutiny narratives that returned to England. Grann's third major narrative non-fiction book and the canonical contemporary maritime-disaster story.
An Immense World
by Ed Yong
An Immense World by Ed Yong 2022 review. How animals sense the world: bat echolocation, electric eels, the magnetic compass of birds, the chemical world of moths. The most-cited contemporary popular science book on animal perception.
A Promised Land
by Barack Obama
A Promised Land by Barack Obama 2020 review. The first volume of Barack Obama's presidential memoirs, covering his early political life through the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. The most thoroughly written contemporary presidential memoir in modern American letters.
Becoming
by Michelle Obama
Becoming by Michelle Obama 2018 review. Michelle Obama's memoir, from her South Side Chicago childhood through the Obama White House. The political memoir that sold seventeen million copies, and the one that genuinely earns its bestseller status.
Educated
by Tara Westover
Educated by Tara Westover 2018 review. The memoir of growing up in a survivalist Idaho family that kept her out of school until age seventeen, and her subsequent education through Brigham Young University and Cambridge. The PEN/Bingham winner and one of the canonical contemporary memoirs.
More by this author