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Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever

In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “ Sapiens ,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.

“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, has spent the years since the publication of “Sapiens” in conversations about this cliffhanger. His two subsequent best-sellers—“ Homo Deus ” (2017) and “ 21 Lessons for the 21st Century ” (2018)—focus on the present and the near future. Harari now defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. He dwells particularly on the possibility that biometric monitoring, coupled with advanced computing, will give corporations and governments access to more complete data about people—about their desires and liabilities—than people have about themselves. A life under such scrutiny, he said recently, is liable to become “one long, stressing job interview.”

If Harari weren’t always out in public, one might mistake him for a recluse. He is shyly oracular. He spends part of almost every appearance denying that he is a guru. But, when speaking at conferences where C.E.O.s meet public intellectuals, or visiting Mark Zuckerberg ’s Palo Alto house, or the Élysée Palace, in Paris, he’ll put a long finger to his chin and quietly answer questions about Neanderthals, self-driving cars, and the series finale of “Game of Thrones.” Harari’s publishing and speaking interests now occupy a staff of twelve, who work out of a sunny office in Tel Aviv, where an employee from Peru cooks everyone vegan lunches. Here, one can learn details of a scheduled graphic novel of “Sapiens”—a cartoon version of Harari, wearing wire-framed glasses and looking a little balder than in life, pops up here and there, across time and space. There are also plans for a “Sapiens” children’s book, and a multi-season “Sapiens”-inspired TV drama, covering sixty thousand years, with a script by the co-writer of Mel Gibson’s “ Apocalypto .”

Harari seldom goes to this office. He works at the home he shares with Itzik Yahav, his husband, who is also his agent and manager. They live in a village of expensive modern houses, half an hour inland from Tel Aviv, at a spot where Israel’s coastal plain is first interrupted by hills. The location gives a view of half the country and, hazily, the Mediterranean beyond. Below the house are the ruins of the once mighty Canaanite city of Gezer; Harari and Yahav walk their dog there. Their swimming pool is blob-shaped and, at night, lit a vivid mauve.

At lunchtime one day in September, Yahav drove me to the house from Tel Aviv, in a Porsche S.U.V. with a rainbow-flag sticker on its windshield. “Yuval’s unhappy with my choice of car,” Yahav said, laughing. “He thinks it’s unacceptable that a historian should have money.” While Yahav drove, he had a few conversations with colleagues, on speakerphone, about the fittings for a new Harari headquarters, in a brutalist tower block above the Dizengoff Center mall. He said, “I can’t tell you how much I need a P.A.”—a personal assistant—“but I’m not an easy person.” Asked to consider his husband’s current place in world affairs, Yahav estimated that Harari was “between Madonna and Steven Pinker .”

Harari and Yahav, both in their mid-forties, grew up near each other, but unknown to each other, in Kiryat Ata, an industrial town outside Haifa. (Yahav jokingly called it “the Israeli Chernobyl.”) Yahav’s background is less solidly middle class than his husband’s. When the two men met, nearly twenty years ago, Harari had just finished his graduate studies, and Yahav teased him: “You’ve never worked? You’ve never had to pick up a plate for your living? I was a waiter from age fifteen!” He thought of Harari as a “genius geek.” Yahav, who was then a producer in nonprofit theatre, is now known for making bold, and sometimes outlandish, demands on behalf of his husband. “Because I have only one author, I can go crazy,” he had told me. In the car, he noted that he had declined an invitation to have Harari participate in the World Economic Forum, at Davos, in 2017, because the proposed panels were “not good enough.” A year later, when Harari was offered the main stage, in a slot between Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron , Yahav accepted. His recollections of such negotiations are delivered with self-mocking charm and a low, conspiratorial laugh. He likes to say, “You don’t understand—Yuval works for me!  ”

We left the highway and drove into the village. He said of Harari, “When I meet my friends, he’s usually not invited, because my friends are crazy and loud. It’s too much for him. He shuts down.” When planning receptions and dinners for Harari, Yahav follows a firm rule: “Not more than eight people.”

For more than a decade, Harari has spent several weeks each year on a silent-meditation retreat, usually in India. At home, he starts his day with an hour of meditation; in the summer, he also swims for half an hour while listening to nonfiction audiobooks aimed at the general reader. (Around the time of my visit, he was listening to a history of the Cuban Revolution, and to a study of the culture of software engineering.) He swims the breaststroke, wearing a mask, a snorkel, and “bone conduction” headphones that press against his temples, bypassing the ears.

When Yahav and I arrived at the house, Harari was working at the kitchen table, reading news stories from Ukraine, printed for him by an assistant. He had an upcoming speaking engagement in Kyiv, at an oligarch-funded conference. He was also planning a visit to the United Arab Emirates, which required some delicacy—the country has no diplomatic ties with Israel.

The house was open and airy, and featured a piano. (Yahav plays.) Harari was wearing shorts and Velcro-fastened sandals, and, as Yahav fondly observed, his swimming headphones had left imprints on his head. Harari explained to me that the device “beams sound into the skull.” Later, with my encouragement, he put on his cyborgian getup, including the snorkel, and laughed as I took a photograph, saying, “Just don’t put that in the paper, because Itzik will kill both me and you.”

Unusually for a public intellectual, Harari has drawn up a mission statement. It’s pinned on a bulletin board in the Tel Aviv office, and begins, “Keep your eyes on the ball. Focus on the main global problems facing humanity.” It also says, “Learn to distinguish reality from illusion,” and “Care about suffering.” The statement used to include “Embrace ambiguity.” This was cut, according to one of Harari’s colleagues, because it was too ambiguous.

One recent afternoon, Naama Avital, the operation’s C.E.O., and Naama Wartenburg, Harari’s chief marketing officer, were sitting with Yahav, wondering if Harari would accept a hypothetical invitation to appear on a panel with President Donald Trump.

“I think that whenever Yuval is free to say exactly what he thinks, then it’s O.K.,” Avital said.

Yahav, surprised, said that he could perhaps imagine a private meeting, “but to film it—to film Yuval with Trump?”

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“You’d have a captive audience,” Wartenburg said.

Avital agreed, noting, “There’s a politician, but then there are his supporters—and you’re talking about tens of millions of people.”

“A panel with Trump ?” Yahav asked. He later said that he had never accepted any speaking invitations from Israeli settlers in the West Bank, adding that Harari, although not a supporter of settlements, might have been inclined to say yes.

Harari has acquired a large audience in a short time, and—like the Silicon Valley leaders who admire his work—he can seem uncertain about what to do with his influence. Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian translation of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” had been edited to make it more palatable to Vladimir Putin’s government. Harari had approved some of these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its 2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by President Trump.

Harari’s office is still largely a boutique agency serving the writing and speaking interests of one client. But, last fall, it began to brand part of its work under the heading of “Sapienship.” The office remains a for-profit enterprise, but it has taken on some of the ambitions and attributes of a think tank, or the foundation of a high-minded industrialist. Sapienship’s activities are driven by what Harari’s colleagues call his “vision.” Avital explained that some projects she was working on, such as “Sapiens”-related school workshops, didn’t rely on “everyday contact with Yuval.”

Harari’s vision takes the form of a list. “That’s something I have from students,” he told me. “They like short lists.” His proposition, often repeated, is that humanity faces three primary threats: nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption. Other issues that politicians commonly talk about—terrorism, migration, inequality, poverty—are lesser worries, if not distractions. In part because there’s little disagreement, at least in a Harari audience, about the seriousness of the nuclear and climate threats, and about how to respond to them, Harari highlights the technological one. Last September, while appearing onstage with Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s President, at an “influencers’ summit” in Tel Aviv, Harari said, in Hebrew, “Think about a situation where somebody in Beijing or San Francisco knows what every citizen in Israel is doing at every moment—all the most intimate details about every mayor, member of the Knesset, and officer in the Army, from the age of zero.” He added, “Those who will control the world in the twenty-first century are those who will control data.”

He also said that Homo sapiens would likely disappear, in a tech-driven upgrade. Harari often disputes the notion that he makes prophecies or predictions—indeed, he has claimed to do “the opposite”—but a prediction acknowledging uncertainty is still a prediction. Talking to Rivlin, Harari said, “In two hundred years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens —there will be something else.”

“What a world,” Rivlin said. The event ended in a hug.

Afterward, Harari said of Rivlin, “He took my message to be kind of pessimistic.” Although the two men had largely spoken past each other, they were in some ways aligned. An Israeli President is a national figurehead, standing above the political fray. Harari claims a similar space. He speaks of looming mayhem but makes no proposals beyond urging international coöperation, and “focus.” A parody of Harari’s writing, in the British magazine Private Eye , included streams of questions: “What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? If you are in a falling lift, will it do any good to jump up and down like crazy? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? What is the state capital of Wyoming?”

This tentativeness at first seems odd. Harari has the ear of decision-makers; he travels the world to show them PowerPoint slides depicting mountains of trash and unemployed hordes. But, like a fiery street preacher unable to recommend one faith over another, he concludes with a policy shrug. Harari emphasizes that the public should press politicians to respond to tech threats, but when I asked what that response should be he said, “I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think it will come from me. Even if I took three years off, and just immersed myself in some cave of books and meditation, I don’t think I would emerge with the answer.”

Harari’s reluctance to support particular political actions can be understood, in part, as instinctual conservatism and brand protection. According to “Sapiens,” progress is basically an illusion; the Agricultural Revolution was “history’s biggest fraud,” and liberal humanism is a religion no more founded on reality than any other. Harari writes, “The Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.” In such a context, any specific policy idea is likely to seem paltry, and certainly too quotidian for a keynote speech. A policy might also turn out to be a mistake. “We are very careful, the entire team, about endorsing anything, any petition,” Harari told me.

Harari has given talks at Google and Instagram. Last spring, on a visit to California, he had dinner with, among others, Jack Dorsey , Twitter’s co-founder and C.E.O., and Chris Cox, the former chief product officer at Facebook. It’s not hard to understand Harari’s appeal to Silicon Valley executives, who would prefer to cast a furrowed gaze toward the distant future than to rewrite their privacy policies or their algorithms. (Zuckerberg rarely responds to questions about the malign influence of Facebook without speaking of his “focus” on this or that.) Harari said of tech entrepreneurs, “I don’t try intentionally to be a threat to them. I think that much of what they’re doing is also good. I think there are many things to be said for working with them as long as it’s possible, instead of viewing them as the enemy.” Harari believes that some of the social ills caused by a company like Facebook should be understood as bugs—“and, as good engineers, they are trying to fix the bugs.” Earlier, Itzik Yahav had said that he felt no unease about “visiting Mark Zuckerberg at his home, with Priscilla, and Beast, the dog,” adding, “I don’t think Mark is an evil person. And Yuval is bringing questions.”

Harari’s policy agnosticism is also connected to his focus on focus itself. The aspect of a technological dystopia that most preoccupies him—losing mental autonomy to A.I.—can be at least partly countered, in his view, by citizens cultivating greater mindfulness. He collects examples of A.I. threats. He refers, for instance, to recent research suggesting that it’s possible to measure people’s blood pressure by processing video of their faces. A government that can see your blood boiling during a leader’s speech can identify you as a dissident. Similarly, Harari has observed that, had sophisticated artificial intelligence existed when he was younger, it might have recognized his homosexuality long before he was ready to acknowledge it. Such data-driven judgments don’t need to be perfectly accurate to outperform humans. Harari argues that, though there’s no sure prophylactic against such future intrusions, people who are alert to the workings of their minds will be better able to protect themselves. Harari recently told a Ukrainian reporter, “Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you.” In this context, to think clearly—to snorkel in the pool, back and forth—is a form of social action.

Naama Avital, in the Tel Aviv office, told me that, on social media, fans of Harari’s books tend to be “largely male, twenty-five to thirty-five.” Bill Gates is a Harari enthusiast, but the more typical reader may be a young person grateful for permission to pay more attention to his or her needs than to the needs of others. (Not long ago, one of Harari’s YouTube admirers commented, “Your books changed my life, Yuval. Just as investing in Tesla did.”)

Harari doesn’t dismiss more active forms of political engagement, particularly in the realm of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but his writing underscores the importance of equanimity. In a section of “Sapiens” titled “Know Thyself,” Harari describes how the serenity achieved through meditation can be “so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.” “21 Lessons” includes extended commentary on the life of the Buddha, who “taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying.” Harari continues, “You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind, but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you. . . . ‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises, ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ ”

Harari didn’t learn the result of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election until five weeks after the vote. He was on a retreat, in England. In Vipassana meditation, the form that Harari practices, a retreat lasts at least ten days. He sometimes does ten-day retreats in Israel, in the role of a teaching assistant. Once a year, he goes away for a month or longer. Participants at a Vipassana center may talk to one another as they arrive—while giving up their phones and books—but thereafter they’re expected to be silent, even while eating with others.

I discussed meditation with Harari one day at a restaurant in a Tel Aviv hotel. (A young doorman recognized him and thanked him for his writing.) We were joined by Itzik Yahav and the mothers of both men. Jeanette Yahav, an accountant, has sometimes worked in the Tel Aviv office. So, too, has Pnina Harari, a former office administrator; she has had the task of responding to the e-mail pouring into Harari’s Web site: poems, pieces of music, arguments for the existence of God.

Harari said of the India retreats, which take place northeast of Mumbai, “Most of the day you’re in your own cell, the size of this table.”

“Unbelievable,” Pnina Harari said.

During her son’s absences, she and Yahav stay in touch. “We speak, we console each other,” she said. She also starts a journal: “It’s like a letter to Yuval. And the last day of the meditation I send it to him.” Once back in Mumbai, he can open an e-mail containing two months of his mother’s news.

Before Itzik Yahav met Harari, through a dating site, he had some experience of Vipassana, and for years they practiced together. Yahav has now stopped. “I couldn’t keep up,” he told me. “And you’re not allowed to drink. I want to drink with friends, a glass of wine.” I later spoke to Yoram Yovell, a friend of Harari’s, who is a well-known Israeli neuroscientist and TV host. A few years ago, Yovell signed up for a ten-day retreat in India. He recalled telling himself, “This is the first time in ten years that you’re having a ten-day vacation, and you’re spending it sitting on your tush, on this little mat, inhaling and exhaling. And outside is India!  ” He lasted twenty-four hours. (In 2018, two years after authorities in Myanmar began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims, Jack Dorsey completed a ten-day Vipassana retreat in that country, and defended his visit by saying, “This was a purely personal trip for me focused on only one dimension: meditation.”)

At lunch, Pnina Harari recalled the moment when Yuval’s two older sisters reported to her that Yuval had taught himself to read: “He was three, not more than four.”

Yuval smiled. “I think more like four, five.”

She described the time he wrote a school essay, then rewrote it to make it less sophisticated. He told her that nobody would have understood the first draft.

From the age of eight, Harari attended a school for bright students, two bus rides away from his family’s house in Kiryat Ata. Yuval’s father, who died in 2010, was born on a kibbutz, and maintained a life-long skepticism about socialism; his work, as a state-employed armaments engineer, was classified. By the standards of the town, the Harari household was bourgeois and bookish.

The young Yuval had a taste for grand designs. He has said, “I promised myself that when I grew up I would not get bogged down in the mundane troubles of daily life, but would do my best to understand the big picture.” In the back yard, he spent months digging a very deep hole; it was never filled in, and sometimes became a pond. He built, out of wood blocks and Formica tiles, a huge map of Europe, on which he played war games of his own invention. Harari told me that during his adolescence, against the backdrop of the first intifada, he went through a period when he was “a kind of stereotypical right-wing nationalist.” He recalled his mind-set: “Israel as a nation is the most important thing in the world. And, obviously, we are right about everything. And the whole world doesn’t understand us and hates us. So we have to be strong and defend ourselves.” He laughed. “You know—the usual stuff.”

He deferred his compulsory military service, through a program for high-achieving students. (The service was never completed, because of an undisclosed health problem. “It wasn’t something catastrophic,” he said. “I’m still here.”) When he began college, at Hebrew University, he was younger than his peers, and he had not shared the experience of three years of activity often involving groups larger than eight. By then, Harari’s nationalist fire had dimmed. In its place, he had attempted to will himself into religious conviction—and an observant Jewish life. “I was very keen to believe,” he said. He supposed, wrongly, that “if I read enough, or think about it enough, or talk to the right people, then something will click.”

In Chapter 2 of “Sapiens,” Harari describes how, about seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens began to develop nuanced language, and thereby began to dominate other Homo species, and the world. Harari’s discussion reflects standard scholarly arguments, but he adds this gloss: during what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens became uniquely able to communicate untruths. “As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled,” he writes, referring to myths and gods. “Many animals and human species could previously say ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ ” This mental leap enabled coöperation among strangers: “Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.”

In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations. Harari uses “fiction” where another might say “social construct.” (He explained to me, “I would almost always go for the day-to-day word, even if the nuance of the professional word is a bit more accurate.”) Harari further proposes that fictions require believers , and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists. Every social construct, then, is a kind of religion: a declaration of universal human rights is not a manifesto, or a program, but the expression of a benign delusion; an activity like using money, or obeying a stoplight, is a collective fantasy, not a ritual. When I asked him if he really meant this, he laughed, and said, “It’s like the weak force in physics—which is weak, but still strong enough to hold the entire universe together!” (In fact, the weak force is responsible for the disintegration of subatomic particles.) “It’s the same with these fictions—they are strong enough to hold millions of people together.”

In his representation of how people function in society, Harari sometimes seems to be extrapolating from his personal history—from his eagerness to believe in something. When I called him a “seeker,” he gave amused, half-grudging assent.

As an undergraduate, Harari wrote a paper, for a medieval-history class, that was later published, precociously, in a peer-reviewed journal. “ The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment ” challenged the previously held assumption that, in crusader armies, most cavalrymen were heavily armored. Harari proposed, in an argument derived from careful reading of sources across several centuries, that many were light cavalrymen. Benjamin Kedar, who taught the class, told me that the paper “was absolutely original, and really a breakthrough.” It seems to be generally agreed that, had Harari stuck solely to military history of this era, he would have become a significant figure in the field. Idan Sherer, a former student and research assistant of Harari’s who now teaches at Ben Gurion University, said, “I don’t think the prominent scholar, but definitely one of them.”

In academic prose, especially philosophy, Harari seems to have found something analogous to what he had sought in nation and in faith. “I had respect for, and belief in, very dense writing,” he recalled. “One of the first things I did when I came out, to myself, as gay—I went to the university library and took out all these books about queer theory, which were some of the densest things I’ve ever read.” He jokingly added, “It almost converted me back. It was ‘O.K., now you’re gay, so you need to be very serious about it.’ ”

In 1998, he began working toward a doctorate in history, at the University of Oxford. “He was oppressed by the grayness,” Harari’s mother recalled, at lunch. Harari agreed: “It wasn’t the greatest time of my life. It was a culture shock, it was a climate shock. I just couldn’t grasp it could be weeks and weeks and you never see the sun.” He later added, “It was a personal impasse. I’d hoped that, by studying and researching, I would understand not only the world but my life.” He went on, “All the books I’d been reading and all the philosophical discussions—not only did they not provide an answer, it seemed extremely unlikely that any answer would ever come out of this.” He told himself, “There is something fundamentally wrong in the way that I’m approaching this whole thing.”

One reason he chose to study outside Israel was to “start life anew,” as a gay man. On weekends, he went to London night clubs. (“I think I tried Ecstasy a few times,” he said.) And he made dates online. He set himself the target of having sex with at least one new partner a week, “to make up for lost time, and also understand how it works—because I was very shy.” He laughed. “Very strong discipline!” He treated each encounter as a credit in a ledger, “so if one week I had two, and then the next week there was none, I’m O.K.”

These recollections contain no regret, but, Harari said, “coming out was a kind of false enlightenment.” He explained, “I’d had this feeling— this is it . There was one big piece of the puzzle that I was missing, and this is why my life was completely fucked up.” Instead, he felt “even more miserable.”

On a dating site, Harari met Ron Merom, an Israeli software engineer. As Merom recently recalled, they began an intense e-mail correspondence “about the meaning of life, and all that.” They became friends. (In 2015, when “Sapiens” was first published in English, Merom was working for Google in California, and helped arrange for Harari to give an “Authors at Google” talk, which was posted online—an important early moment of exposure.) Merom, who now works at Facebook, has forgotten the details of their youthful exchanges, but can recall their flavor: Harari’s personal philosophy at the time was complex and dark, “even a bit violent or aggressive”—and this included his discussion of sexual relationships. As Merom put it, “It was ‘I need to conquer the world—either you win or you lose.’ ”

Merom had just begun going on meditation retreats. He told Harari, “It sounds like you’re looking for something, and Vipassana might be it.” In 2000, when Harari was midway through his thesis—a study of how Renaissance military memoirists described their experiences of war—he took a bus to a meditation center in the West of England.

Ten days later, Harari wrote to Amir Fink, a friend in Israel. Fink, who now works as an environmentalist, told me that Harari had quoted, giddily, the theme song of a “Pinocchio” TV show once beloved in Israel: “Good morning, world! I’m now freed from my strings. I’m a real boy.”

At the retreat, Harari was told that he should do nothing but notice his breath, in and out, and notice whenever his mind wandered. This, Harari has written, “was the most important thing anybody had ever told me.”

Steven Gunn, an Oxford historian and Harari’s doctoral adviser, recently recalled the moment: “I sort of did my best supervisorial thing. ‘Are you sure you’re not getting mixed up in a cult?’ So far as I could tell, he wasn’t being drawn into anything he didn’t want to be drawn into.”

On a drive with Yahav and Harari from their home to Jerusalem, I asked if it was fair to think of “Sapiens” as an attempt to transmit Buddhist principles, not just through its references to meditation—and to the possibility of finding serenity in self-knowledge—but through its narrative shape. The story of “Sapiens” echoes the Buddha’s “basic realities”: constant change; no enduring essence; the inevitability of suffering.

“Yes, to some extent,” Harari said. “It’s definitely not a conscious project. It’s not ‘O.K.! Now I believe in these three principles, and now I need to convince the world, but I can’t state it directly, because this would be a missionary thing.’ ” Rather, he said, the experience of meditation “imbues your entire thinking.”

He added, “I definitely don’t think that the solution to all the world’s problems is to convert everybody to Buddhism, or to have everybody meditating. I meditate, I know how difficult it is. There’s no chance you can get eight billion people to meditate, and, even if they try, in many cases it could backfire in a terrible way. It’s very easy to become self-absorbed, to become megalomaniacal.” He referred to Ashin Wirathu, an ultranationalist Buddhist monk in Myanmar, who has incited violence against Rohingya Muslims.

In “Sapiens,” Harari went on, part of the task had been “to show how everything is impermanent, and what we think of as eternal social structures—even family, money, religion, nations—everything is changing, nothing is eternal, everything came out of some historical process.” These were Buddhist thoughts, he said, but they were easy enough to access without Buddhism. “Maybe biology is permanent, but in society nothing is permanent,” he said. “There’s no essence, no essence to any nation. You don’t need to meditate for two hours a day to realize that.”

We drove to Hebrew University, which is atop Mt. Scopus. We walked into the humanities building, and, through an emergency exit, onto a rooftop. There was a panoramic view of the Old City and the Temple Mount. Harari recalled his return to the university, from Oxford, in 2001, during the second intifada. The university is surrounded by Arab neighborhoods that he’s never visited. In the car, he had been talking about current conditions in Israel; in recent years, he had said, “many, if not most, Israelis simply lost the motivation to solve the conflict, especially because Israel has managed to control it so efficiently.” Harari told me that, as a historian, he had to dispute the assumption that an occupation can’t last “for decades, for centuries”—it can, and new surveillance technologies can enable oppression “with almost no killing.” Harari saw no alternative other than “to wait for history to work its magic—a war, a catastrophe.” With a dry laugh, he said, “Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran—a couple of thousand people die, something . This can break the mental deadlock.”

Harari recalled a moment, in 2015, when he and Yahav had accidentally violated the eight-person rule. They had gone to a dinner that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to attend. Netanyahu was known to have read “Sapiens.” “We were told it would be very intimate,” Harari said. There were forty guests. Harari shared a few pleasantries with Netanyahu, but they had “no real exchange at all.”

Yahav interjected to suggest that, because of “Sapiens,” Netanyahu “started doing Meatless Monday.” Harari, who, like Yahav, largely avoids eating animal products, writes in “Sapiens” that “modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.” When Netanyahu announced a commitment “to fight cruelty toward animals,” friends encouraged Harari to take a little credit.

“People told me this was my greatest achievement,” Harari said. “I managed to convince Netanyahu of something! It didn’t matter what.” This assessment gives some indication of Harari’s local politics, but Yoram Yovell, his TV-presenter friend, said that he had tried and failed to persuade Harari to speak against Netanyahu publicly. Yovell said that Harari, although “vehemently against Netanyahu,” seemed to resist “jumping into the essence of life—the blood and guts of life,” adding, “I actually am disappointed with it.” Harari, who has declined invitations to write a regular column in the Israeli press, told me, “I could start making speeches, and writing, ‘Vote for this party,’ and maybe, one time, I can convince a couple of thousand people to change their vote. But then I will kind of expend my entire credit on this. I’ll be identified with one party, one camp.” He did acknowledge that he was discouraged by the choice presented by the September general election , which was then imminent: “It’s either a right-wing government or an extreme-right-wing government. There is no other serious option.”

At Hebrew University, his role is somewhat rarefied: he has negotiated his way to having no faculty responsibilities beyond teaching; he currently advises no Ph.D. students. (He said of his professional life, “I write the books and give talks. Itzik is doing basically everything else.”) Harari teaches one semester a year, fitting three classes into one day a week. His recent courses include a history of relations between humans and animals—the subject of a future Harari book, perhaps—and another called History for the Masses, on writing for a general reader. During our visit to the university, he took me to an empty lecture hall with steeply raked seating. “This is where ‘Sapiens’ originated,” he said. He noted, with mock affront, that the room attracts stray cats: “They come into class, and they grab all the attention. ‘A cat! Oh!’ ”

“It’s hard to keep a good friendship when someone’s financial status changes,” Amir Fink told me. Fink and his husband, a musicologist, have known Harari since college. “We have tried to keep his success out of it. As two couples, we meet a lot, we take vacations abroad together.” (Neither couple has children.) Fink went on, “We love to come to their place for the weekend.” They play board games, such as Settlers of Catan, and “whist—Israeli Army whist.”

Fink spoke of the scale of the operation built by Harari and Yahav. “I hope it’s sustainable,” he said. With “Sapiens,” he went on, Harari had written “a book that summarizes the world.” The books that followed were bound to be “more specific, and more political.” That is, they drew Harari away from his natural intellectual territory. “Homo Deus” derived directly from Harari’s teaching, but “21 Lessons,” Fink said, “is basically a collection of articles and responses to the present day.” He added, “It’s very hard for Yuval to keep himself as a teacher,” noting, “He becomes, I guess, what the French would call a philosophe .”

While Harari was at Oxford, he read Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, “ Guns, Germs, and Steel ,” and was dazzled by its reach, across time and place. “It was a complete life-changer,” Harari said. “You could actually write such books!” Steven Gunn, Harari’s Oxford adviser, told me that, as Harari worked on his thesis, he had to be discouraged from taking too broad a historical view: “I have memories of numerous revision meetings where I’d say, ‘Well, all this stuff about people flying helicopters in Vietnam is very interesting, and I can see why you need to read it, and think about it, to write about why people wrote the way they did about battles in Italy in the sixteenth century, but, actually, the thesis has to be nearly all about battles in Italy in the sixteenth century.’ ”

After Harari received his doctorate, he returned to Jerusalem with the idea of writing a history of the gay experience in Israel. He met with Benjamin Kedar. Kedar recently said, “I gave him a hard look—‘Yuval, do it after you get tenure.’ ”

Harari, taking this advice, stuck with his specialty. But his continued interest in comparative history was evident in the 2007 book “ Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550 ,” whose anachronistic framing provoked some academic reviewers. And the following year, in “ The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000 ,” Harari was at last able to include an extended discussion of Vietnam War memoirs.

In 2003, Hebrew University initiated an undergraduate course, An Introduction to the History of the World. Such classes had begun appearing in a few history departments in the previous decade; traditional historians, Kedar said, were often disapproving, and still are: “They say, ‘You teach the French Revolution, and if somebody looks out of the window they miss the revolution’—all those jokes.” Gunn said that “Oxford makes sure people study a wide range of history, but it does it by making sure that people study a wide range of different detailed things, rather than one course that goes right across everything.”

Harari agreed to teach the world-history course, as well as one on war in the Middle Ages. He had always hated speaking to people he didn’t know. He told me that, as a younger man, “if I had to call the municipality to arrange some bureaucratic stuff, I would sit for like ten minutes by the telephone, just bringing up the courage.” (One can imagine his bliss in the dining hall at a meditation retreat—the sound of a hundred people not starting a conversation.) Even today, Harari is an unassuming lecturer: conferences sometimes give him a prizefighter’s introduction, with lights and music, at the end of which he comes warily to the podium, says, “Hello, everyone,” and sets up his laptop. Yahav described watching Harari recently freeze in front of an audience of thousands in Beijing. “I was, ‘Start moving!  ’ ”

As an uncomfortable young professor, Harari tended to write out his world-history lectures as a script. At one point, as part of an effort to encourage his students to listen to his words, rather than transcribe them, he began handing out copies of his notes. “They started circulating, even among students who were not in my class,” Harari recalled. “That’s when I thought, Ah, maybe there’s a book in it.” He imagined that a few students at other universities would buy the book, and perhaps “a couple of history buffs.”

This origin explains some of the qualities that distinguish “Sapiens.” Unlike many other nonfiction blockbusters, it isn’t full of catchy neologisms or cinematic scene-setting; its impact derives from a steady management of ideas, in prose that has the unhedged authority—and sometimes the inelegance—of a professor who knows how to make one or two things stick. (“An empire is a political order with two important characteristics . . .”) “Guns, Germs, and Steel” begins with a conversation between Jared Diamond and a Papua New Guinean politician; in “Sapiens,” Harari does not figure in the narrative. He told me, “Maybe it is some legacy of my study of memoirs and autobiographies. I know how dangerous it is to make personal experience your main basis for authority.”

It still astonishes Harari that readers became so excited about the early pages of “Sapiens,” which describe the coexistence of various Homo species. “I thought, This is so banal!” he told me. “There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I’m not an archeologist. I’m not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research. . . . It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.”

The Israeli edition, “A Brief History of Humankind,” was published in June, 2011. Yoram Yovell recalled that “Yuval became beloved very quickly,” and was soon a regular guest on Israeli television. “It was beautiful to see the way he handled it,” Yovell added. “He’s intellectually self-confident but truly modest.” The book initially failed to attract foreign publishers. Harari and Yahav marketed a print-on-demand English-language edition, on Amazon; this was Harari’s own translation, and it included his Gmail address on the title page, and illustrations by Yahav. It sold fewer than two thousand copies. In 2013, Yahav persuaded Deborah Harris, an Israeli literary agent whose clients include David Grossman and Tom Segev, to take on the book. She proposed edits and recommended hiring a translator. Harris recently recalled that, in the U.K., an auction of the revised manuscript began with twenty-two publishers, “and it went on and on and on,” whereas, in the U.S., “I was getting the most insulting rejections, of the kind ‘Who does this man think he is?’ ” Harvill Secker, Harari’s British publisher, paid significantly more for the book than HarperCollins did in the U.S.

Harari and Yahav recently visited Harris at her house, in Jerusalem; it also serves as her office. They had promised to cart away copies of “Sapiens”—in French, Portuguese, and Malay—that were filling up her garden shed. At her dining table, Harris recalled seeing “Sapiens” take off: “The reviews were extraordinary. And then Obama. And Gates.” (Gates, on his blog : “I’ve always been a fan of writers who try to connect the dots.”) Harris began spotting the book in airports; “Sapiens,” she said, was reaching people who read only one book a year.

There was a little carping from reviewers—“Mr. Harari’s claim that Columbus ignited the scientific revolution is surprising,” a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal wrote —but the book thrived in an environment of relative critical neglect. At the time of its publication, “Sapiens” was not reviewed in the Times , The New York Review of Books , or the Washington Post. Steven Gunn supposes that Harari, by working on a far greater time scale than the great historical popularizers of the twentieth century, like Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, substantially protected himself from experts’ scoffing. “ ‘Sapiens’ leapfrogs that, by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that nobody can say, “We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong,” ’ ” Gunn said. “Because what he’s doing is just building an extremely big model, about an extremely big process.” He went on, “Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.”

Deborah Harris did not work on “Homo Deus.” By then, Yahav had become Harari’s agent, after closely watching Harris’s process, and making a record of all her contacts. “It wasn’t even done secretly!” she said, laughing.

Yahav was sitting next to her. “He’s a maniac and a control freak,” Harris said. In her own dealings with publishers, she continued, “I have to retain a semblance of professionalism—I want these people to like me. He didn’t care! He’s never going to see these people again, and sell anything else to them. They can all think he’s horrible and ruthless.”

They discussed the controversy over the pliant Russian translation of “21 Lessons.” Harris said that, if she had been involved, “that would not have happened.”

Yahav, who for the first time looked a little pained, asked Harris if she would have refused all of the Russian publisher’s requests for changes.

“Russia, you don’t fuck around,” she said. “You don’t give them an inch.” She asked Harari if he would do things differently now.

“Hmm,” he said. Harari drew a distinction between changes he had approved and those he had not: for example, he hadn’t known that, in the dedication, “husband” would become “partner.” In public remarks, Harari has defended allowing some changes as an acceptable compromise when trying to reach a Russian audience. He has also said, “I’m not willing to write any lies. And I’m not willing to add any praise to the regime.”

They discussed the impending “Sapiens” spinoffs. Harris, largely enthusiastic about the plans, said, “I’m just not a graphic-novel person.” She then told Harari to wait before writing again. “I think you should learn to fly a plane,” she said. “You could do anything you want. Walk the Appalachian Trail.”

One day in mid-September, Harari walked into an auditorium set up in an eighteenth-century armory in Kyiv, wearing a Donna Karan suit and bright multicolored socks. He had just met with Olena Zelenska, the wife of the Ukrainian President. The next day, he would meet Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s former President, and accept a gift box of chocolates made by Poroshenko’s company. Harari was about to give a talk at a Yalta European Strategy conference, a three-day, invitation-only event modelled on Davos. YES is funded by Victor Pinchuk , the billionaire manufacturing magnate, with the aim of promoting Ukraine’s orientation toward the West, and of promoting Victor Pinchuk.

As people took their seats, Harari stood with Pinchuk at the front of the auditorium, and for a few minutes he was exposed to strangers. Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist, introduced himself. David Rubenstein, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the Carlyle Group, gave Harari his business card. Rubenstein has become a “thought leader” at gatherings like YES , and he interviews wealthy people for Bloomberg TV. (Later that day, during a YES dinner where President Volodymyr Zelensky was a guest, Rubenstein interviewed Robin Wright, the “ House of Cards ” star. His questions were not made less awkward by being barked. “ You’re obviously a very attractive woman ,” he said. “How did you decide what you wanted to do?”)

Harari’s talk lasted twenty-four minutes. He used schoolbook-style illustrations: chimney stacks, Michelangelo’s David. Nobody on Harari’s staff had persuaded him not to represent mass unemployment with art work showing only fifty men. He argued that the danger facing the world could be “stated in the form of a simple equation, which might be the defining equation of the twenty-first century: B times C times D equals AHH. Which means: biological knowledge, multiplied by computing power, multiplied by data, equals the ability to hack humans.” After the lecture, Harari had an onstage discussion with Pinchuk. “We should change the focus of the political conversation,” Harari said, referring to A.I. And: “This is one of the purposes of conferences like this—to change the global conversation.” Throughout Harari’s event, senior European politicians in the front row chatted among themselves.

When I later talked to Steven Pinker, he made a candid distinction between speaking opportunities that were “too interesting to turn down” and others “too lucrative to turn down.” Hugo Chittenden, a director at the London Speaker Bureau, an agency that books speakers for events like YES , told me that Harari’s fee in Kyiv would reflect the fact that he’s a fresh face; there’s only so much enthusiasm for hearing someone like Tony Blair give the speech he’s given on such occasions for the past decade. On the plane to Kyiv, Yahav had indicated to me that Harari’s fee would be more than twice what Donald Trump was paid when he made a brief video appearance at YES , in 2015. Trump received a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

In public, at least, Harari doesn’t echo Pinker’s point about money gigs, and he won’t admit to having concerns about earning a fee that might compensate him, in part, for laundering the reputations of others. “We can’t check everyone who’s coming to a conference,” he told me. He was unmoved when told that Jordan Peterson , the Canadian psychologist and self-help author known for his position that “the masculine spirit is under assault,” had cancelled his YES appearance. Later this year, in Israel, Harari plans to have a private conversation with Peterson. Harari said of Peterson’s representatives, “They offered to do a public debate. And we said that we don’t want to, because there is a danger that it will just be mud wrestling.” Yahav had earlier teased Harari, saying, “You don’t argue. If somebody says something you don’t like, you don’t say, ‘I don’t like it.’ You just shut up.”

In Kyiv, Harari gave several interviews to local journalists, and sometimes mentioned a man who had been on our flight from Israel to Ukraine. After the plane left the gate, there was a long delay, and the man stormed to the front, demanding to be let off. There are times, Harari told one reporter, when the thing “most responsible for your suffering is your own mind.” The subject of human suffering—even extreme suffering—doesn’t seem to agitate Harari in quite the way that industrial agriculture does. Indeed, Harari has taken up positions against what he calls humanism, by which he means “the worship of humanity,” and which he discovers in, among other places, the foundations of Nazism and Stalinism. (This characterization has upset humanists.) Some of this may be tactical—Harari is foregrounding a contested animal-rights position—but it also reflects an aspect of his Vipassana-directed thinking. Human suffering occurs; the issue is how to respond to it. Harari’s suggestion that the airline passenger, in becoming livid about the delay, had largely made his own misery was probably right; but to turn the man into a case study seemed to breeze past all of the suffering that involves more than a transit inconvenience.

The morning after Harari’s lecture, he welcomed Pinker to his hotel suite. They hadn’t met before this trip, but a few weeks earlier they had arranged to film a conversation, which Harari would release on his own platforms. Pinker later joked that, when making the plan, he’d spoken only with Harari’s “minions,” adding, “ I want to have minions.” Pinker has a literary agent, a speaking agent, and, at Harvard, a part-time assistant. Contemplating the scale of Harari’s operation, he said, without judgment, “I don’t know of any other academic or public intellectual who’s taken that route.”

Pinker is the author of, most recently, “ Enlightenment Now ,” which marshals evidence of recent human progress. “We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences,” he writes. “Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited.” He told me that, while preparing to meet Harari, he had refreshed his skepticism about futurology by rereading two well-known essays—Robert Kaplan’s “ The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet ,” published in The Atlantic in 1994, and “ The Long Boom ,” by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, published in Wired three years later (“We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?”).

As a camera crew set up, Harari affably told Pinker, “The default script is that you will be the optimist and I will be the pessimist. But we can try and avoid this.” They chatted about TV, and discovered a shared enthusiasm for “ Shtisel ,” an Israeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox family, and “ Veep .”

“What else do you watch?” Harari asked.

“ ‘ The Crown ,’ ” Pinker said.

“Oh, ‘The Crown’ is great!”

Harari had earlier told me that he prefers TV to novels; in a career now often focussed on ideas about narrative and interiority, his reflections on art seem to stop at the observation that “fictions” have remarkable power. Over supper in Israel, he had noted that, in the Middle Ages, “only what kings and queens did was important, and even then not everything they did,” whereas novels are likely “to tell you in detail about what some peasant did.” Onstage, at YES , he had said, “If we think about art as kind of playing on the human emotional keyboard, then I think A.I. will very soon revolutionize art completely.”

The taped conversation began. Harari began to describe future tech intrusions, and Pinker, pushing back, referred to the ubiquitous “telescreens” that monitor citizens in Orwell’s “ 1984 .” Today, Pinker said, it would be a “trivial” task to install such devices: “There could be, in every room, a government-operated camera. They could have done that decades ago. But they haven’t, certainly not in the West. And so the question is: why didn’t they? Partly because the government didn’t have that much of an interest in doing it. Partly because there would be enough resistance that, in a democracy, they couldn’t succeed.”

Harari said that, in the past, data generated by such devices could not have been processed; the K.G.B. could not have hired enough agents. A.I. removes this barrier. “This is not science fiction,” he said. “This is happening in various parts of the world. It’s happening now in China. It’s happening now in my home country, in Israel.”

“What you’ve identified is some of the problems of totalitarian societies or occupying powers,” Pinker said. “The key is how to prevent your society from being China.” In response, Harari suggested that it might have been only an inability to process such data that had protected societies from authoritarianism. He went on, “Suddenly, totalitarian regimes could have a technological advantage over the democracies.”

Pinker said, “The trade-off between efficiency and ethics is just in the very nature of reality. It has always faced us—even with much simpler algorithms, of the kind you could do with paper and pencil.” He noted that, for seventy years, psychologists have known that, in a medical setting, statistical decision-making outperforms human intuition. Simple statistical models could have been widely used to offer diagnoses of disease, forecast job performance, and predict recidivism. But humans had shown a willingness to ignore such models.

“My view, as a historian, is that seventy years isn’t a long time,” Harari said.

When I later spoke to Pinker, he said that he admired Harari’s avoidance of conventional wisdom, but added, “When it comes down to it, he is a liberal secular humanist.” Harari rejects the label, Pinker said, but there’s no doubt that Harari is an atheist, and that he “believes in freedom of expression and the application of reason, and in human well-being as the ultimate criterion.” Pinker said that, in the end, Harari seems to want “to be able to reject all categories.”

The next day, Harari and Yahav made a trip to Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat. They invited a few other people, and hired a guide. Yahav embraced a role of half-ironic worrier about health risks; the guide tried to reassure him by giving him his dosimeter, which measures radiation levels. When the device beeped, Yahav complained of a headache. In the ruined Lenin Square in Pripyat, he told Harari, “You’re not going to die on me. We’ve discussed this—I’m going to die first. I was smoking for years.”

Harari, whose work sometimes sounds regretful about most of what has happened since the Paleolithic era—in “Sapiens,” he writes that “the forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do”—began the day by anticipating, happily, a glimpse of the world as it would be if “humans destroyed themselves.” Walking across Pripyat’s soccer field, where mature trees now grow, he remarked on how quickly things had gone “back to normal.”

The guide asked if anyone had heard of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—the video game, which includes a sequence set in Pripyat.

“No,” Harari said.

“Just the most popular game in the world,” the guide said.

At dusk, Harari and Yahav headed back to Kyiv, in a black Mercedes. When Yahav sneezed, Harari said, “It’s the radiation starting.” As we drove through flat, forested countryside, Harari talked about his upbringing: his hatred of chess; his nationalist and religious periods. He said, “One thing I think about how humans work—the only thing that can replace one story is another story.”

We discussed the tall tales that occasionally appear in his writing. In “Homo Deus,” Harari writes that, in 2014, a Hong Kong venture-capital firm “broke new ground by appointing an algorithm named VITAL to its board.” A footnote provides a link to an online article , which makes clear that, in fact, there had been no such board appointment, and that the press release announcing it was a lure for “gullible” outlets. When I asked Harari if he’d accidentally led readers into believing a fiction, he appeared untroubled, arguing that the book’s larger point about A.I. encroachment still held.

In “Sapiens,” Harari writes in detail about a meeting in the desert between Apollo 11 astronauts and a Native American who dictated a message for them to take to the moon. The message, when later translated, was “They have come to steal your lands.” Harari’s text acknowledges that the story might be a “legend.”

“I don’t know if it’s a true story,” Harari told me. “It doesn’t matter—it’s a good story.” He rethought this. “It matters how you present it to the readers. I think I took care to make sure that at least intelligent readers will understand that it maybe didn’t happen.” (The story has been traced to a Johnny Carson monologue.)

Harari went on to say how much he’d liked writing an extended fictional passage, in “Homo Deus,” in which he imagines the belief system of a twelfth-century crusader. It begins, “Imagine a young English nobleman named John . . .” Harari had been encouraged in this experiment, he said, by the example of classical historians, who were comfortable fabricating dialogue, and by “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ,” by Douglas Adams, a book “packed with so much good philosophy.” No twentieth-century philosophical book besides “ Sources of the Self ,” by Charles Taylor, had influenced him more.

We were now on a cobbled street in Kyiv. Harari said, “Maybe the next book will be a novel.”

At a press conference in the city, Harari was asked a question by Hannah Hrabarska, a Ukrainian news photographer. “I can’t stop smiling,” she began. “I’ve watched all your lectures, watched everything about you.” I spoke to her later. She said that reading “Sapiens” had “completely changed” her life. Hrabarska was born the week of the Chernobyl disaster, in 1986. “When I was a child, I dreamed of being an artist,” she said. “But then politics captured me.” When the Orange Revolution began, in 2004, she was eighteen, and “ so idealistic.” She studied law and went into journalism. In the winter of 2013-14, she photographed the Euromaidan protests, in Kyiv, where more than a hundred people were killed. “You always expect everything will change, will get better,” she said. “And it doesn’t.”

Hrabarska read “Sapiens” three or four years ago. She told me that she had previously read widely in history and philosophy, but none of that material had ever “interested me on my core level.” She found “Sapiens” overwhelming, particularly in its passages on prehistory, and in its larger revelation that she was “one of the billions and billions that lived, and didn’t make any impact and didn’t leave any trace.” Upon finishing the book, Hrabarska said, “you kind of relax, don’t feel this pressure anymore—it’s O.K. to be insignificant.” For her, the discovery of “Sapiens” is that “life is big, but only for me.” This knowledge “lets me own my life.”

Reading “Sapiens” had helped her become “more compassionate” toward people around her, although less invested in their opinions. Hrabarska had also spent more time on creative photography projects. She said, “This came from a feeling of ‘O.K., it doesn’t matter that much, I’m just a little human, no one cares.’ ”

Hrabarska has disengaged from politics. “I can choose to be involved, not to be involved,” she said. “No one cares, and I don’t care, too.” ♦

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A GRAPHIC HISTORY: THE BIRTH OF HUMANKIND: VOLUME ONE

by Yuval Noah Harari ; adapted by David Vandermeulen & illustrated by Daniel Casanave & Claire Champion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2020

An informative, breathless sprint through the evolution and consequences of human development.

The professor and popular historian expands the reach of his internationally bestselling work with the launch of a graphic nonfiction series.

In a manner that is both playful and provocative, Harari teams with co-creators adept at the graphic format to enliven his academic studies. Here, a cartoon version of the professor takes other characters (and readers) on something of a madcap thrill ride through the history of human evolution, with a timeline that begins almost 14 billion years ago and extends into the future, when humanity becomes the defendant in “Ecosystem vs. Homo Sapiens,” a trial presided over by “Judge Gaia.” As Harari and his fellow time travelers visit with other academics and a variety of species, the vivid illustrations by Casaneve and colorist Champion bring the lessons of history into living color, and Vandermeulen helps condense Harari’s complex insights while sustaining narrative momentum. The text and illustrations herald evolution as “the greatest show on earth” while showing how only one of “six different human species” managed to emerge atop the food chain. While the Homo sapiens were not nearly as large, strong, fast, or powerful as other species that suffered extinction, they were able to triumph due to their development of the abilities to cooperate, communicate, and, perhaps most important, tell and share stories. That storytelling ultimately encompasses fiction, myth, history, and spirituality, and the success of shared stories accounts for a wide variety of historical events and trends, including Christianity, the French Revolution, and the Third Reich. The narrative climaxes with a crime caper, as a serial-killing spree results in the extinction of so many species, and the “Supreme Court of the future” must rule on the case against Homo sapiens . Within those deliberations, it’s clear that not “being aware of the consequences of their actions” is not a valid excuse.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-305133-1

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | ANCIENT | WORLD | HISTORY | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | GENERAL HISTORY

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New York Times Bestseller

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

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THE RIGHT STUFF

by Tom Wolfe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1979

Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts. But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill. But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979

ISBN: 0312427565

Page Count: 370

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979

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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, book review: Eloquent history of what makes us human

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It is an impediment to understanding the human story that the innovations that made us human – a long list including the control of fire, articulate language, the development of agriculture and herding, the working of metals, glass and other materials, abstract reasoning – took place over periods out of kilter with the time span of human generations.

Each generation saw itself as living a similar life to its predecessors, with the occasional addition of a slightly better way of accomplishing one thing or another. The true course of events is only now being uncovered by the sophisticated forensic techniques developed by science, not least the sequencing of ancient DNA and the mapping of human migrations through the DNA profiles of people living today.

As a historian, Yuval Harari (who teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) belongs to the school founded by Jared Diamond (who endorses the book on the cover), in applying scientific research to every aspect of human history, not just the parts for which no written accounts exist. In truth, Harari uses less science than Diamond. He emphasizes the difficulty of knowing in detail the lives of our remote forebears and is often content to say – of topics that are being urgently investigated by the more forensically inclined – "frankly, we don't know". His ideas are mostly not new, being derived from Diamond, but he has a very trenchant way of putting them over.

Typical is a bravura passage on the domestication of wheat, in which he floats the conceit that wheat domesticated us. What was once an undistinguished grass in a small part of the Middle East now covers a global area eight times the size of England. Humans have to slave to serve the wheat god: " Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space..." and so on.

Harari proposes three big revolutions around which his story revolves: the Cognitive Revolution of around 70,000 years ago (articulate language); the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago; and the Scientific Revolution of 500 years ago. The last is part of history, the second is increasingly well understood, but the first is still shrouded in a mystery that DNA research will probably one day clear up.

Although the book is billed as a short history, it is just as much a philosophical meditation on the human condition. One great overriding argument runs through it: that all human culture is an invention. The rules of football; the concept of a limited liability company; the laws relating to property and marriage; the character, actions and notional edicts of deities – all are examples of what Harari calls Imagined Order. He develops this idea into a magnificent, humane polemic, particularly highlighting the sorrows that accrue from society's justification of its cruel practices as either natural or ordained by God (they are neither).

Not only is Harari eloquent and humane, he is often wonderfully, mordantly funny. Much of what we take to be inherent cultural traditions are of recent adoption: "William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chilli".

Towards the end of the book, the influence of thinkers other than Diamond emerges. He rehearses Steven Pinker's argument that objectively (to judge by mortality statistics) the world is, despite appearances, becoming less violent; passages on individual happiness and how it can be assessed alongside more conventional historical topics smack of Theodore Zeldin, both in style and content.

Inevitably, in a "big picture" account such as this, some portions of the canvas are less hatched in than others. For this reader, these later sections seemed weaker, but in the last chapter the brio returns as Harari considers what humankind – who developed culture to escape the constraints of biology – will became now that it is also a biological creator. Sapiens is a brave and bracing look at a species that is mostly in denial about the long road to now and the crossroads it is rapidly approaching.

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3 mind-blowing facts about humans that I learned from reading 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind'

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• " Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " is a bestseller praised by Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
• The nonfiction book explores the history and evolution of humans and the modern world.
• Here's a summary of 3 facts I learned and how they helped expand my understanding of humanity.

As an avid reader, my understanding of the world has greatly expanded through novels. I'm accustomed to looking at people through the emotional and psychological lens of relationships and community, always exploring how different social factors and personal histories make us so unique. 

And while I've mostly preferred learning through fictional stories and characters, the non-fiction bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " not only amplified my understanding of the human condition but also deepened my understanding of human s. The book, a biological, intellectual, and economic account of humankind, explained the biological "why" behind everything I've ever known about people, including myself.

Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, an internationally recognized historian and philosopher, introduced me to concepts that explore the very foundation of how humans evolved from nomadic apes to philosophical beings who ponder the meaning of life. I've been spouting quotes and information from this book ever since I finished reading it, so here are the three most fascinating concepts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."

3 amazing facts I learned from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind":

Self-preservation is a biological instinct that greatly impacted the course of humankind — and explains some of our problems today..

The early developments of Homo sapiens were entirely biological, centered around sustaining and creating life. Yet some of our evolution's disadvantages heavily outweighed the advantages.

For instance, in the development of the agricultural revolution, humans found that wheat was incredibly difficult to farm, not economically secure, and not even that nutritious. So why did we invest time and energy into farming anyway? According to Harari, farming fulfilled our biological needs by helping communities settle down, give birth to more babies in a shorter amount of time, and feed a larger number of people on a smaller space of land. 

To put it into today's terms, the pursuit of an easier life often generates greater hardships. It's called the luxury trap: As Harari puts it, "luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations." For example, we used to mails letter when we had something to say. Now, we send and receive dozens of emails every day, many of us considering it a necessity to have email access on our phones for even quicker responses. Immediate email correspondence was a luxury that has become a 21st-century necessity, spawning new obligations to be attached to our phones. 

It's nearly impossible to break the luxury trap cycle: It's spawned by our biological desire to make life easier so we can conserve time, energy, or money.  But humankind's instinct to cater to ourselves also has some positives. It's helped us evolve from farming wheat to generating significant technological advances and boosting our cognitive capacity for empathy, to name a few things. 

Because we create societal values, we can determine which values hold the most meaning.

When humans began to trade nomadic life for settlements, we created values to help govern societies. Our societal agreements are based on inter-subjective beliefs — the foundations of society are agreed-upon concepts of law, money, religion, and nations that link billions of humans to an imagined order that does not exist outside of our consciousness. Even the idea of "rights" is not something that exists in biology: It's an imagined order that controls the population because enough people believe in it.

The idea that we fabricated the social concepts that tie us to our political views and institutions might spur an existential crisis, but learning this was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. While fully abandoning the greatest societal contracts would create planet-wide chaos, it can be helpful to remember individual (and often invisible) pressures that we feel to be constantly achieving or fitting into a particular mold don't have as much control over us as we think. If we question some of these imagined constructs, we might find ourselves closer to intellectual freedom.

Happiness is a relatively recent focus for humankind.

As Harari points out, happiness is an incalculable abstraction. The closest measurable figure is pleasure, a chemical sensation that keeps humans alive by rewarding us when we eat or reproduce — not exactly what most of us think when we imagine self-fulfillment.

Yet, as the cognitive revolution carried humankind through advances that would shape all of planet Earth, the importance of happiness emerged. Happiness is subjective, the scale of which has dramatically changed from the Middle Ages to now. But it is also the unit many of us use to determine if our lives feel worthwhile. 

In much of the history of humankind, we ignored the idea that happiness drove any kind of evolution. But as we grew through rapid technological evolutions, our motivation has focused more on our subjective well-being. Humankind's search for a meaningful life is how we've managed to survive a history's worth of hardships, such as defending a country's values in a war or exploring new hobbies during a pandemic.

The biological rules that dictated the survival of Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years have changed in only the past few decades. With our advances in medicine, agriculture, and technology, humans have been able to shift our focus from survival and reproduction to happiness and meaning. With this realization that humanity's sole purpose is no longer to survive but thrive , we can prioritize self-actualization. 

A Good Reed Review

Reviews, commentary, and stories from a musical engineer's perspective, book review: ‘sapiens: a brief history of humankind’ – a story of where we came from and where we might be going.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , by Yuval Noah Harari, was first published in the U.S. in 2015, and it took the country by storm. It quickly became a New York Times best seller and is used in numerous history courses around the country. Great Britain saw its English language release a year earlier in 2014, but the author’s countrymen saw it first published in his native Hebrew a few years before that in 2011. Beyond that, the book has been translated into over thirty languages worldwide, and at least the American English version is credited as being translated by Harari, with help from John Purcell and Haim Watzman. Why did Sapiens:… make such a splash around the world? It tells a fascinating story. Harari is an Israeli born historian and a tenured history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a passion for how every human endeavor affects history and the world.

Harari begins his tale with a prologue containing the following historical, broad-stroke timeline to frame his story. The timeline appears in Sapiens: … under the heading, “Timeline of History” (included here for reference and because it’s rather interesting):

Harari’s timeline provides the framework and compressed timeframe reference for the book that tells the story of the progress of Homo sapiens driven largely by three major revolutions:

• The Cognitive Revolution
• The Agricultural Revolution
• The Scientific Revolution

He recognizes the importance of the Industrial Revolution as well, but he asserts that was more of a steady state condition, expanding The Scientific Revolution and humankind’s scientific progress rather than creating another specific metamorphosis. Harari points out that it did greatly increase Sapiens’ destructive power. Compared to many history textbooks that are rife with names and dates, Harari’s approach is broader. His time references are more in terms of ranges and time either before the present, or in the future in his last couple of chapters as he looks ahead to where humankind might be headed.

Some of Harari’s use of terms in his timeline differ from those that might readily come to mind. One obvious example is his use of the term intelligent design. For many readers the concept that comes to mind when they see that term is religious in nature, not a science reference. Harari’s use of that term in the context provided is specific to our modern day advances in genetic engineering rather than in reference to Creation Theory.

Harari writes from a historical perspective, and employs results and theories from science to amplify his narrative. His notes section in the back of the book serves as a chapter by chapter bibliography providing a wealth of scientific and historical references for his assertions. He also provides a clear and reasonably comprehensive index to allow readers to quickly find particular topics of interest.

Although the book is written as a history textbook, the prose is gripping, and it can be read in novel fashion as well. It keeps a reader’s interest telling a story that is at once riveting and certainly relevant across age, educational, and regional boundaries.

After the timeline, the text of the book is written in four parts including the three major revolutions along with a part discussing the unification of our species before the Scientific Revolution. Each part is several chapters long, pulling from the timeline as the story builds. Although Harari occasionally jumps forward with an example of how some past occurrence is reflected in modern times, the overall flow is logical and very easy to follow. He also sometimes uses a bit of hyperbole or humor to make a point. At times, this serves to make some of his more complex science or cultural references a bit more accessible to a wider audience. In those cases, some purists might potentially take offense.

Throughout the course of his chronicle, Harari presents multiple, often contradictory, theories surrounding various events, particularly in cases where no definitive answer has yet been determined. At times, while no one theory completely explains a given historical phenomenon, Harari poses an interesting combination of explanations allowing the aggregation of various theories to come close.

Today, a discussion of biological classification can be found in any high school or college biology textbook. The names are Latin, but they are neither pompous nor capricious. They are based on specific criteria at each level of classification facilitating clarity to help scientists in understanding the biological world. Harari is very aware of the science surrounding the historical record, even if he occasionally makes light of it or is a bit loose with some of the specifics.

Sapiens:… is a history textbook, not a biology textbook, so with respect to the biological classification, Harari doesn’t refer to the entire taxonomy. He instead refers to only the parts immediately pertinent to his narrative. In that context, he colloquially references the family of great apes (family – Hominidae ), and he refers to humans (or humankind) as generic way to identify any species under the genus Homo ; whereas, his use of the term Sapiens as a proper noun refers specifically to Homo sapiens , as opposed to Homo neanderthalensis , Homo erectus , or any of our other sister species. Based on scientific evidence, he further states that at one point in history there were at least six different species of humans, and our current exclusivity is both peculiar and portentous.

As a side note, for the purposes of reflecting consistency between the discussion in this review and the prose in Harari’s text, I employ the following conventions:

• Homo sapiens refers to the specific species.
• Sapiens: … is used as a shortcut to refer to the title of the book since the full title, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , was defined in the first paragraph and would be rather cumbersome to keep restating in full.
• Sapiens (not italicized) is used as a proper noun to reference the species Homo sapiens in the same way that the proper noun Neandertathals refers to the species Homo neanderthalensis .

As an example of how Harari often discusses competing theories of a given event or artifact, he briefly presents two opposing theories (Interbreeding Theory and Replacement Theory) of how Sapiens became the solo human species (at least for the present).

Harari, not being afraid of potential controversy, forges ahead to first argue the merits of the Replacement Theory using Sapiens’ legendary, and historically documented, intolerance. In support of this thesis, Harari points to the weight that modern members of our species put on even small differences such as skin color, language, or religion often being the motivation behind innumerable horrors. Given that propensity, Harari suggests that it’s unlikely that ancient Sapiens would have been more tolerant toward other human species. Instead, he suggests, per the Replacement Theory, that it’s far more likely that Sapiens saw them as a threat.

He then reverses course and citing recent advances in the Human Genome Project, concedes that the Interbreeding Theory would apply. He ends his discussion conceding that the full answer probably lies with some combination of the two theories, even though on the surface, they seem to be mutually exclusive.

There has been a great deal of speculation through the ages about what makes Sapiens such a dominant force in the Animal Kingdom, and Harari makes a strong case for the Cognitive Revolution being the crucial start of Sapiens moving from the middle of the pack to the top. He maintains that the key distinguishing Sapiens development was its use of fictive language. He points out that there are numerous tool makers in the animal kingdom, as well as many other species with opposable thumbs, but he asserts that none of the others have demonstrated the ability to imagine.

The historical record suggests that the Cognitive Revolution was also the start of the Sapiens spread from Africa. Harari points out, somewhat heavy handedly, that wherever Sapiens went, the ecology changed, and some number of other species ceased to exist. He supports his conjecture with fossil evidence from Australia where the appearance of Sapiens caused the megafauna to die off in short order. Here he employs a bit of poetic license to suggest a colorful sequence of events that fits the data, but whether it happened the way he suggests or some other way, it’s pretty clear that Sapiens certainly had a part in that ecological change.

One fascinating concept that Harari describes in detail is that of a common myth, which of course is predicated on the Sapiens ability to conceptualize and to fictionalize. In the modern world, there are innumerable common myths to which we ascribe. National boundaries are common myths. Corporations and governments are common myths. Religions are common myths. These constructs are imaginary in nature, but societies (or subsets thereof) collectively accept them as real, and it’s this type of cognitive acceptance that allows large numbers of outright strangers to cooperate.

Harari’s contention is that the second major metamorphosis that shaped Sapiens history was the Agricultural Revolution that occurred about 12,000 years ago. Prior to that point, Sapiens relied on hunting and gathering to sustain themselves, without taking any definitive actions to alter the course of nature to shape its available banquet. On the surface, domestication of a small set of plants and animals seems like a leap forward. Harari contends that in many ways, the advent of farming made the average Sapiens’ life more difficult, and forced them to work harder. As Harari shows throughout the book, he welcomes controversy. While describing the events that transpired surrounding the Agricultural Revolution, he again steps forcefully into another debate – suggesting that Sapiens didn’t actually domesticate the plants. Instead, a small number of plants (e.g., wheat, rice, potatoes) domesticated Sapiens.

Harari goes on to describe in some detail various facets of this revolution and its effects on the history of humankind. The net, in his view, is that the Agricultural Revolution afforded Sapiens an evolutionary advantage. From that perspective, the only thing that matters is that the number of members of a given species is maximized, or in biological terms, the number of copies of their DNA increases. The Agricultural Revolution, bringing with it permanent settlements, money, religion, increased violence and disease within their settlements, and worse conditions (quality of life) for the vast majority of individuals, still allowed them to increase their overall population faster, and as such, allowed Sapiens to become more evolutionarily successful.

According to Harari’s narrative, the fate of the animals that Sapiens domesticated through the Agricultural Revolution ranged from being pampered to persecuted. A specific animal’s lot in life hinged on whether they were raised to play, to work, or as food. Portions of that part of the story are rather grisly, but they are entirely plausible, as well as observable in modern society.

The effects of the Agricultural Revolution are shown to be far reaching, and Harari continues with a discussion surrounding the ebb and flow of civilizations growing out of Sapiens’ new found stability. He illustrates how the spread of imperial rule, the development of the written word, commerce, and religion bring about even greater spans of influence and control than were possible before.

Harari’s discussion of religion again plunges the story headlong into controversy. He first describes the rise of polytheism as somewhat innocuous. His interpretation of the cultural evidence is that there were numerous polytheistic beliefs that tended to be regional. Each population assumed their pantheon of gods applied only to them, and as such, there was no reason or benefit in attempting to force neighboring populations to either acknowledge or submit to them. He acknowledges that there were some exceptions, but overall, he contends that this tended to be the case. He then illustrates that as missionary monotheistic beliefs began to take hold, the story changed.

With the rise of missionary monotheism, Harari claims there was a commensurate rise in religious wars, and history is rife with examples of religious persecution. He segregates missionary monotheistic beliefs from non-missionary practices like Judaism because he claims that if proselytizing isn’t part of the culture, there’s no imperial benefit.

While the book’s discussion of religion provides a glaring example, and religion’s influence on Sapiens is later revisited in a chapter entitled “The Law of Religion,” there are other examples of just how unjust history can be. Harari includes a chapter entitled “There is No Justice in History” to explore various facets of life being unfair throughout humankind’s development following the Agricultural Revolution. There are ample examples to fuel his discussion, but he boils it down to a simple concept that grew out of the Cognitive Revolution – “humans created imagined orders and devised scripts.” In other words, they made up imaginary rules and hierarchies to cover the gaps where biology and instinct fell short.

Among the hierarchies, the gender divide is one that is particularly touchy, and Harari provides an interesting look at potential reasons why, since the Agricultural Revolution, most Sapiens societies tend to be patriarchal, and how this is ostensibly to Sapiens’ detriment. He asserts that women are inherently more cooperative than men, and as a species, Sapiens need to cooperate in order to survive, so a patriarchal structure would be suboptimal. The potential justifications he explores include: muscle power, aggression, and patriarchal genes. He doesn’t answer the question, but he poses some interesting material to contemplate.

After a thorough look at the effects of the Agricultural Revolution, Harari then explores how humankind unified over time. This bridges a number of events leading through ever larger civilizations, and shows the means to cooperation and conflict on an even larger scale.

Harari then explores the next major metamorphosis which came through the Scientific Revolution. In the course of human history, this was relatively recent, beginning only about 500 years ago. Although humankind has sought to understand the universe in which it lives since the Cognitive Revolution, the big change that sparked the Scientific Revolution was that Sapiens as a species was finally able to admit its ignorance. Harari’s story goes on to point out some details of the scientific method, articulate the importance of mathematics and observation, and most importantly, supports the idea that a key result of the Scientific Revolution was to open human cultures to view progress as an ideal to work toward.

One interesting point that comes out in Harari’s text is that exploration and conquest were instrumental in furthering the pursuit of scientific knowledge. In fact, Harari conjectures that if not for the audacity of the European explorers, the Scientific Revolution might not have occurred.

After a lengthy discussion of numerous contributing events, Harari then explores how the Scientific Revolution made the Industrial Revolution possible. He doesn’t claim that the Industrial Revolution is another key historical branch, more that it is the steady state extension made possible by the Scientific Revolution. He notes that in modern times, while Sapiens have shown a remarkable, and an almost unlimited capacity to mold nature to their needs, they have become subject to the whims of industry and government.

Harari presents a detailed discussion of possible causes, impacts, and realities of modern life including whether all of Sapiens’ achievements make them happier now than they were much earlier in their development (something which clearly cannot be formally ascertained). Based on what has come before, Harari ends his narrative speculating on a number of potential futures humankind might experience, some enchanting, some predicting its demise. One interesting point is that Harari contends that it is possible, through the course of evolution, that Sapiens may not always be the only human species. Multiple members of the genus Homo once existed, and though the same ones might not reappear, he suggests there is the potential that new ones could eventually assert themselves, or Sapiens could even invent them through techniques that are currently the fodder of science fiction.

Even if a reader discounts many of Harari’s assertions, the story he weaves is a fascinating and compelling read. The book is also refreshing in offering several theories of how this history unfolded. Harari doesn’t claim to have all the answers, only the insight to put the events together into a coherent story, and to ask the questions that he and others have pondered.

References: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , Harper, by Yuval Noah Harari Summary: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Also by Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow , Harper, by Yuval Noah Harari

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7 thoughts on “ book review: ‘sapiens: a brief history of humankind’ – a story of where we came from and where we might be going ”.

[…] Book Review: ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ – a story of where we came from and where… Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harper, by Yuval Noah Harari Summary: Sapiens: A Brief […]

This follow-on article includes a deeper discussion of Harari’s concept of “common myths” and how they have become so integral to human society. Our ability to tell stories is central to our potential for cooperation, and it will also determine our long term success or failure.

[…] and additional reading: Book Review: ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ – a story of where we came from and where… Follow-on thoughts about ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ – Part 1: Common Myths […]

This follow-on article explores how Harari covers the subject of happiness with respect to humankind. His insights and conclusions are not completely mainstream, but they are quite provocative.

[…] Book Review: ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ – a story of where we came from and where… […]

[…] The Population Bomb, by Dr. Paul Ehrlich The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ – a story of where we came from and where we might be … Common Myths Preparing the world for the next pandemic Climate Change May Make Pandemics More […]

[…] and other negative traits because they achieve more evolutionary success in the short term. Yuval Noah Harari posits in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind that to be an evolutionary success, an organism needs to create as many copies of itself as […]

[…] https://agoodreedreview.com/2017/05/26/book-review-sapiens-humankind/ https://agoodreedreview.com/2017/05/30/sapiens-thoughts-common-myths/ […]

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GEORGE SPROTT: 1894-1975, by Seth. (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95.) First serialized in The New York Times Magazine, this is the sweet, sad story of George Sprott, the aging host of a long-running television show, as rendered in Seth’s clean lines.

BLUBBER, by Gilbert Hernandez. (Fantagraphics, $19.99.) Hernandez, one of the creators of the beloved “Love and Rockets” strip, here offers a menagerie of weird invented monsters — like the Pollum, the Junipero Molestat, the mythical Forest Nimmy — engaged in unspeakable and strange acts.

SAPIENS: A Graphic History, Volume 2: The Pillars of Civilization, by Yuval Noah Harari, David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave. (Harper Perennial, $25.99.) This second volume of the graphic version of Harari’s book about the evolutionary history of humans focuses on the agricultural revolution of 12,000 years ago.

ENTER THE BLUE, by Dave Chisholm. (Z2 Comics, $19.99.) The legend of a mysterious jazz realm, the Blue, is explored through the story of a musician who has gone comatose. The music and its enigmatic secrets are presented in full color.

TIDES, by Sara Freeman. (Grove, $26.) Mara, a 37-year-old grieving from the loss of her child during a stillbirth, uproots her life and moves to a seaside town, where she works at a wine shop and slowly learns to heal.

THERE IS LIFE AFTER THE NOBEL PRIZE, by Eric R. Kandel. (Columbia University, $19.95.) The neuroscientist writes about his lab’s scientific advances, his accomplishments, and personal revelations since he won the Nobel Prize in 2000.

I EMBRACE YOU WITH ALL MY REVOLUTIONARY FERVOR: Letters: 1947-1967, by Che Guevara. (Seven Stories, $35.) This collection spans the last 20 years of Guevara’s life and includes letters sent during his Motorcycle Diaries trip, the Cuban revolution and more.

AMERICAN URBANIST: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life, by Richard K. Rein. (Island Press, $35.) This intellectual biography of Whyte, a pioneer of people-centered urban design, covers five decades of his research and writing, including his 1956 best seller, “The Organization Man.”

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How did humans get here? Historian Yuval Noah Harari is thrilled to tell you

Historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote a book back in 2015 that looked at the entirety of human history; from hunter-gatherers to space exploration. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind packs all of this into a mere 400 pages. Harari noted to NPR's Arun Rath that humans have done a great job cultivating power – but where we tend to fall short is translating that power into happiness.

Author Interviews

We went from hunter-gatherers to space explorers, but are we happier.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Paperback – May 15, 2018

New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21 st Century

Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout.

#1 New York Times Bestseller

The Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, now available as a beautifully packaged paperback

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.

• Part of series A Brief History Series
• Print length 464 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper Perennial
• Publication date May 15, 2018
• Dimensions 1.4 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
• ISBN-10 9780062316110
• ISBN-13 978-0062316110
• See all details

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

“ Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language.” — Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel , Collapse , and The World until Yesterday

“ Sapiens is learned, thought-provoking and crisply written…. Fascinating.” — Wall Street Journal

“In Sapiens , Harari delves deep into our history as a species to help us understand who we are and what made us this way. An engrossing read.” — Dan Ariely, New York Times Bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“Yuval Noah Harari’s celebrated Sapiens does for human evolution what Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time did for physics.… He does a superb job of outlining our slow emergence and eventual domination of the planet.” — Forbes

“Ambitious and illuminating …the wonderful and terrifying saga of the human species on earth.” — Christian Science Monitor

“[I]nteresting and provocative…It gives you a sense of perspective on how briefly we’ve been on this earth, how short things like agriculture and science have been around, and why it makes sense for us to not take them for granted.” — President Barack Obama

“I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human history…you’ll have a hard time putting it down.” — Bill Gates

“Thank God someone finally wrote [this] exact book.” — Sebastian Junger

“Yuval Noah Harari is an emerging rock-star lecturer at the nexus of history and science. . . . Sapiens takes readers on a sweeping tour of the history of our species. . . . Harari’s formidable intellect sheds light on the biggest breakthroughs in the human story…important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens.” — Washington Post

“It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species.…It is one hell of a story. And it has seldom been told better…. Compulsively readable and impossibly learned.” — Michael Gerson, Washington Post

“This was the most surprising and thought-provoking book I read this year.” — Atlantic.com

“Yuval Noah Harari’s full-throated review of our species may have been blurbed by Jared Diamond, but Harari’s conclusions are at once balder and less tendentious than that of his famous colleague.” — New York magazine

“This title is one of the exceptional works of nonfiction that is both highly intellectual and compulsively readable… a fascinating, hearty read.” — Library Journal  (starred review)

“An encyclopedic approach from a well-versed scholar who is concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated, and open enough to entertain competing points of view.…The great debates of history aired out with satisfying vigor.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Writing with wit and verve, Harari…attempts to explain how Homo sapiens came to be the dominant species on Earth as well as the sole representative of the human genus.… Provocative and entertaining.” — Publishers Weekly

“The most idea-packed work of non-fiction I’ve read in years.” — Dick Meyer, www.abcactionnews.com

“In this sweeping look at the history of humans, Harari offers readers the chance to reconsider, well, everything, from a look at why Homo sapiens endured to a compelling discussion of how society organizes itself through fictions.” — Booklist Best Books of the Year

“It’s not often that a book offers readers the possibility to reconsider, well, everything. But that’s what Harari does in this sweeping look at the history of humans.… Readers of every stripe should put this at the top of their reading lists. Thinking has never been so enjoyable.” — Booklist (starred review)

“The sort of book that sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain…. Harari…is an intellectual acrobat whose logical leaps will have you gasping with admiration.” — John Carey, Sunday Times (London)

“Harari’s account of how we conquered the Earth astonishes with its scope and imagination…. One of those rare books that lives up to the publisher’s blurb...brilliantly clear, witty and erudite.” — Ben Shepard, the Observer (London)

“An absorbing, provocative history of civilization…packed with heretical thinking and surprising facts. This riveting, myth-busting book cannot be summarised…you will simply have to read it.” — John Gray, Financial Times (London)

“Full of…high-perspective, shocking and wondrous stories, as well as strange theories and startling insights.” — Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

“Not only is Harari eloquent and humane, he is often wonderfully, mordantly funny” — The Independent (London)

“Engaging and informative…. Extremely interesting.” — Guardian (London)

“Harari can write…really, really write, with wit, clarity, elegance, and a wonderful eye for metaphor.” — The Times (Ireland)

From the Back Cover

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens . How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?

In Sapiens , Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, Harari explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?

Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.

About the Author

Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling historian and philosopher, is considered one of the world’s most influential intellectuals today. His popular books—including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow , 21 Lessons for the 21st Century , and the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us —have sold more than forty-five million copies in sixty-five lan­guages. Harari, with his husband, Itzik Yahav, cofounded Sapienship, a social impact company with projects in the fields of education and storytelling, whose main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today. Harari has a PhD in history from the University of Oxford. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and lectures in the depart­ment of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0062316117
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (May 15, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780062316110
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062316110
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.17 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 1.4 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
• #1 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
• #1 in General Anthropology
• #5 in History of Civilization & Culture

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About the author

Yuval noah harari.

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is a historian, philosopher and the bestselling author of 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' (2014); 'Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow' (2016); '21 Lessons for the 21st Century' (2018); the children's series 'Unstoppable Us' (launched in 2022); and 'Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI' (2024). He is also the creator and co-writer of 'Sapiens: A Graphic History': a radical adaptation of 'Sapiens' into a graphic novel series (launched in 2020), which he published together with comics artists David Vandermeulen (co-writer) and Daniel Casanave (illustrator). These books have been translated into 65 languages, with 45 million copies sold, and have been recommended by Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Natalie Portman, Janelle Monáe, Chris Evans and many others. Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford, is a Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's History department, and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Together with his husband, Itzik Yahav, Yuval Noah Harari is the co-founder of Sapienship: a social impact company that advocates for global collaboration, with projects in the realm of education and storytelling.

Customer reviews

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• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 74% 18% 5% 1% 2% 18%
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• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 74% 18% 5% 1% 2% 2%

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Customers say

Customers find the content insightful, well-thought-out, and accessible. They also describe the tone as entertaining, witty, and clever. Readers find the narrative captivating, honest, and comforting. They describe the writing quality as masterful. Opinions differ on the historical context, with some finding it unbiased and enjoyable, while others say it's biased and not a typical academic history book.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book insightful, enjoyable, and ambitious. They say it acquaints readers with many areas of culture that may be new to them. Readers also say the book provides an excellent perspective on how humans managed to become the dominant species. They also say it's impressive and powerful way to focus perception.

"...the broad spectrum of social norms described in the book broadens my ethical outlook and makes me less dogmatic about whatever ideas I used to..." Read more

"This book was so good. It challenged my thoughts , even my prayers with concepts that might wiggle in my brain at times but I would dismiss...." Read more

"...This book is a vast cornucopia of ideas and will acquaint readers with many areas of culture that may be new to them, and what is said about them..." Read more

"...This is an entertaining and thoughtful book ." Read more

Customers find the book very readable, with textbook-smooth pages. They also say it enhances their understanding of languages, religious, social, and economic development. Readers also say the book is well-thought-out, accessible, and comprehensive.

"High level, thought-provoking ideas, lucid exposition, engaging language , and interesting examples. I would recommend this book to ANYONE...." Read more

"...Its reads very easily because it's not dense or inaccessible." Read more

"... Easily read , but not easily coped with. It can send the reader from pessimism to optimism, depression to elation...." Read more

"...It’s that accessible and so much fun to read.I learned so much about history, social culture, and the human race from Sapiens...." Read more

Customers find the tone of the book entertaining, witty, and refreshing. They also say it's a well-argued work on history that contains funny anecdotes.

"...The beautiful and idiomatic language adds much to the exhilarating reading experience...." Read more

"...The writing style is engaging and the author always tries to focus on issues from all perspectives and as a consequence many people reading might..." Read more

"...I also found it darkly amusing and irreverent how he talks about philosophies and hate groups and religions and economic models, all in the same..." Read more

"...Clearing away old models and changing my point of view was at least, entertaining ...." Read more

Customers find the narrative captivating, riveting, and flowing. They also appreciate the honest observations and opinions. Customers also find the book strangely comforting in these bad days of war and terrorism.

"...I found it strangely comforting , in these bad sad days of war and terrorism and misogyny and hatred, to be reminded that this phase we’re in where..." Read more

"...That's what this book is, but it's an interesting story with lots of helpful ideas if you don't take it as fact....." Read more

"...material could be a text book, it is written in a wonderful, almost narrative fashion ...." Read more

"I couldn’t put this book down. The material and flow of the narrative were excellent . I learned so much!!" Read more

Customers find the writing quality masterful, inventive, and honey-like. They also say the book paints a vibrant image of hunter-gatherer life.

"...This is truly a work of art that should be useful to many who find time to read it.The author lectures at the Hebrew University Jerusalem...." Read more

"...Sapiens is also a physically handsome book , with heavy, textbook-smooth pages, and color where best-used...." Read more

"...really write, with wit, clarity, elegance , and awonderful eye for metaphor.”Second, a review of the substance of the book...." Read more

"My Rating - Put it on your listLevel - His style makes it moderate , but the book covers topics like biology, physics, philosophy,..." Read more

Customers find the beginning chapters of the book great and amazing.

"...The first third of the book is amazing ...." Read more

" Great start to the book , very interesting history. However, it’s gets a bit biased and opinionated after about the midway point. Still a great read" Read more

"...is dense with information and minimal fluff, and the rest of the book did not disappoint ...." Read more

"The book begins with a real bang , exploring humanity's early years and the development of the mind. These parts I really enjoyed...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the historical context. Some find it unbiased and neutral, while others say it contains overt historical errors and simplistic explanations.

"... It is unbiased and holds no truths or points of view but allows freewheeling common sense to discern what has happened to us...." Read more

"Sapiens is partly excellent and partly biased . It became a bestseller because the author wrote what the readers want to hear, I am afraid...." Read more

"...It is non-judgemental , yet written in a witty and very clever way...." Read more

"...bereft of scientific criticisms of evolution and contains overt historical errors as well as unconfirmed historical "facts"..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the complexity of the book. Some find it pleasant, not too complicated nor too detailed, but interesting enough to keep. They say it guides the flow of the work well, and provides great content. However, others say it's poorly researched and not thorough, making it hard to read and reference. They also mention that the book provides simplistic explanations of basic developments and is not a scholarly book or for educated professionals.

"...Easily read, but not easily coped with . It can send the reader from pessimism to optimism, depression to elation...." Read more

"...history but the author frames things in such a way that his ordering is very intuitive ...." Read more

"...of humans toward inter-subjective realities, and no mathematical models of its development , evolutionary advantage, or stability...." Read more

" Great explanation of how we started and evolved" Read more

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