Publisher's Synopsis
NOTE: THIS BOOK IS AN UNOFFICIAL SUMMARY AND IT IS NOT WRITTEN BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI Sapiens is written to sound and look like a long lecture and chapters discussing certain aspects in human history and development flow together flawlessly. Harari often cites examples of events that occurred thousands of years ago to better describe some important points. Sometimes, he refers to some scientific findings and he breaks down the procedure used in these studies to better explain his points. These findings are properly stated. Many controversial topics are addressed throughout this book and they were handled with a different level of delicacy. For some topics, he takes a persuasive standpoint in stating his opinion, for others, he sounds disdainful or full of accusation; mostly when religion or animals rights are being discussed. He makes use of terms like indoctrination and intellectual flexibility when talking about clashes between the principles that govern religion and those that govern evolutionary necessity. He employs a skeptical tone when he describes the beliefs of the different non-religious people. He discusses factory farming expansively and to tone down the negativity, he comments on how important consistent food production is to maintain the present population growth rate. The reason for the pessimism that can be found almost throughout this book is because a lot of time is spent talking about some of the falsehoods embedded in the social constructs that govern modern life. It's practically impossible to write a book about hundreds of thousands year-old human evolution from a neutral standpoint, opinion has to be formed on the rationality of religion and the usefulness of money can't be sufficiently expressed without drawing attention to its relative triviality. Sapiens pays mind to the human history and its relationship with political and economic change, wars, military science and so on. American laws, culture and history are frequently used for deep explanations. The history of the western world, Europe, East Asia, South America and native peoples are explored. Happy reading!
