All books
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
- Finished
- February 2024
- Status
- read
- Tags
- history anthropology popular science
Review
A sweeping account of human history through three revolutions: cognitive, agricultural, and scientific. Harari is sometimes too confident in his big claims, but the book's central argument — that our ability to believe in shared fictions is what made cooperation at scale possible — is one of those ideas you can't unsee once you've encountered it.
"You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven."