Though the concepts are unusual and sometimes heavy (as is the book, literally) Harari’s deft prose and wry, subversive humor make quick work of material prone to academic tedium. His ideas are interesting and often amusing: Why have humans managed to build astonishingly large populations when other primate groups top out at 150 individuals? Because our talent for gossip allows us to build networks in societies too large for personal relationships between everyone, and our universally accepted “imagined realities”-such as money, religion, and Limited Liability Corporations-keep us in line. Tackling evolutionary concepts from a historian’s perspective, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, describes human development through a framework of three not-necessarily-orthodox “Revolutions”: the Cognitive, the Agricultural, and the Scientific. Among the biggest: How did Homo sapiens (or Homo sapiens sapiens, if you’re feeling especially wise today) evolve from an unexceptional savannah-dwelling primate to become the dominant force on the planet, emerging as the lone survivor out of six distinct, competing hominid species? He also has some answers, and they’re not what you’d expect. history curriculum.An Amazon Best Book of the Month for February 2015: Yuval Noah Harari has some questions. Most recently, David Christian’s “Maps of Time” (2004), an amazing work that begins with the Big Bang, inspired Bill Gates’s crusade to revamp the U.S.
Wells’s “Outline of History” (1918) predicted the collapse of European empires, and the 12 volumes of Arnold Toynbee’s “Study of History” (1934-61) followed von Humboldt in size, popularity and unreadability. Despite its length and inaccessibility, “Cosmos” was wildly popular and inspirational-Whitman supposedly kept a copy on his desk while he wrote “Leaves of Grass.” H.G. A landmark was Alexander von Humboldt’s five-volume “Cosmos” (1845-62), which described the human story as enfolded within universal physical processes. Secular histories couldn’t provide equally grand visions until the 19th century, when chroniclers began drawing on scientific knowledge. These are immensely satisfying on an emotional level they sweep past trifling details to reveal all-encompassing themes.
Religion provided early versions of the human story: Zoroastrian sacred texts, the Book of Genesis, the Popul Vuh.
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