Harari's Sapiens + Alternative Recommendations 🐒

A recent conversation inspired me to share my contrarian opinion of the popular book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: Cool long history facts, creative presentations of money, empires, language and ignorance in history, but full of my own personal pet peeves.

Much of the book is philosophical speculation that contradicts itself, ignores the causative nature of our inner worlds, makes non-relativistic claims of cultural relativism, and lacks a meta-narrative or awareness that it builds on the cultures it tries to deconstruct. There’s a beautiful description of the essence of Buddhism that screens out fundamentalist sects; yet the author can’t seem to apply the same filter to other religions (see the essence, ignore the fundamentalism). You can read more detail in my unedited review on Goodreads, including page numbers. I recommend David Christian's Origin Story or Swimme & Tucker's Journey of the Universe for similar material, or even ​​Humankind which is still quite Green but much healthier in my view.

With love, Jordan