From the Bookshelf of YU Readers Club…

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Start date: November 23, 2019

Finish date: January 24, 2020

Discussion: Book Discussions

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What Members Thought

Dec 31, 2019 Farwa Arshad rated it it was ok

Rating: 2 'thank god I'm leaving this in 2019' stars

thoughts while reading from start to finish :
- The book is informative but the writing style is problematic (insufficient information, condescending point of view) and leaves out big areas in history
- should be renamed 'BIOLOGICAL history of sapiens'
- Does have a lot of unnecessary basic information filled up with even more unnecessary metaphors
- should be renamed 'brief history of sapiens for dummies'
- Reads like a really long essay
- Somet Rating: 2 'thank god I'm leaving this in 2019' stars

thoughts while reading from start to finish :
- The book is informative but the writing style is problematic (insufficient information, condescending point of view) and leaves out big areas in history
- should be renamed 'BIOLOGICAL history of sapiens'
- Does have a lot of unnecessary basic information filled up with even more unnecessary metaphors
- should be renamed 'brief history of sapiens for dummies'
- Reads like a really long essay
- Sometimes It’s like listening to a tenth grade English/history/philosophy teacher
- Expands heavily on simple explanations that we can probably understand by ourselves; note that your audience is not grade-schoolers
- his religious theories were complete bs
- “The Muslim caliphs received a divine mandate to spread the Prophet’s revelation, peacefully if possible but by the sword if necessary.” <== Example of pulling bs theories out of his ass
- “If even Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius – who knew everything there is to know – were unable to abolish famine, disease, poverty, and war from the world, how could we expect to do so?” Factcheck: failed
- The author is trying to reach the word limit of his essay: “What is the difference between describing ‘how’ and explaining ‘why’?”
- The parts of history and historical theories that the author chose to zero in on and explain explicitly say a lot about the kind of person he is i.e., shitting on religion, overly focusing on the biological aspect of history, calling human thoughts and ideologies "delusions"
- destroyed my soul for three weeks and made me dread reading
- Leaves a lot of important key terms completely undefined

three meager pros:
- it was quite informative at times
- helps you understand the bigger picture of our society and how it evolved
- recapping the whole history before starting the new decade kind of felt good

tl;dr: the book was problematic but informative; the second half was written much better than the first one
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