Sapiens - Y. N. Harari

The history of humankind can be analyzed by understanding and analyzing the consequences of revolutions that happened along its way: Cognitive Revolution, Agricultural Revolution and Scientific Revolution. I hope I didn’t forget any. The industrial revolution is also mentioned, but I had the impression it was more of a coincidence that it was called “revolution” as well.

Basically the author goes over these three happenings, explaining what was the status quo before them, what they consisted of and what happened afterwards and calls it a day. In all fairness I found the book a bit simplistic, many choices the author made felt arbitrary. It is of course an impossible (and undesirable, for both writer and reader) task to sum up all of the history of humankind in one book; most of it has to be excluded. But then I would be very careful in arguing why the things left out have been left out.
Also, I didn’t like how dismissively opposing opinions were handled - presented almost as a pro forma and immediately ushered away. Maybe it was in favour of conciseness, maybe it’s a matter of style, bottom line is I didn’t like the attitude.

The consequence of this is that I don’t really know what to make of the content. The whole book is very quotable, and quoting it would probably make you seem smart in some social circles, but the arguments are not presented in enough depth that I would trust making them mine. If someone walked me through a mine field and got me safely on the other side, I wouldn’t trust going back on my own.

So this was a problem for me. Given that I found the book kind of sterile, there are some interesting ideas: the very point of describing the whole history of humankind summing it up in 3 revolutions deserves praise. The author insists a lot on how the world we live in as of today is mostly imagined, resting on shared beliefs as if they were concrete pillars; the important difference between the two being that concrete pillars stays in place even if we stop believing in their strength, shared beliefs become weaker for every person that stops believing in them, and the weaker they become, the most likely they are to crumble. The opposite also holds, but I’d say there is a kind of cupio dissolvi that burns people from inside, so the first tendency is more diffuse. This brings about a refreshing and regular change of cultures and ideals.
Also all the formalization of the concept of empire was interesting, but once again: maybe it wasn’t cherry picking, but I smelled cherries.

(Maybe I just had too high expectations)