Bison from the cave of Altamira. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Harper
Sapiens
A brief history of humankind.
$25.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Yuval Noah Harari
- Publisher
- Harper
- Published
- January 2015
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
A Species Takes Stock of Itself
Yuval Noah Harari, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, compressed the whole human career into one narrative built on three turns: the cognitive revolution that gave Homo sapiens language and shared fictions, the agricultural revolution that traded foraging freedom for grain and hierarchy, and the scientific revolution that admitted ignorance and started measuring. His most quoted claim is the first one, that money, nations, laws and companies are stories, real because enough people believe them together.
Published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014, Sapiens became one of the most widely read nonfiction books of its era, recommended across an unusual span from heads of state to undergraduates. Specialists dispute plenty of it; its achievement is the view from altitude, the species seen whole.
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