Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

I was impressed by two things about this book.

The first is that, in an effort to get things right on a large scale by pulling disparate events together and identifying patterns, Harari is willing to risk being wrong by going out on a limb. The cruel irony of higher education is that it teaches most people to play it safe. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, but you’ve studied dammit and you want to be right about what they’re right about. So listening to or reading informed academics talk is a bit like watching rabbits chew lettuce: it’s all little bites with eyes on horizon, ready to bolt at the first sign of danger. Harari isn’t like that at all. He goes out on limbs, sometimes in areas I know a fair bit about. Sometimes I questioned what he was saying in those areas. But in general, I liked those moments of the book the best because they made a claim and trusted I’d take the time to think about it.

The second thing that impressed me was the clarity with which his book demonstrated what anthropology offers as an academic field. I studied history as an undergraduate and continue to read it as an amateur. Somewhere along the line, I’d foolishly decided that anthropology was the historical study of people living without writing (and of cavemen and of the liberal arts version of evolution). Harari’s book makes me realize that this conception of the field is ignorant enough to approach idiocy. Anthropology is a study of Culture and conceptualizes the term with enough sophistication and breadth to make the “Cultural Studies” I’m familiar with seem parochial. This reassessment of the field is the most significant thing I took away from the book.