Book Review: Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind
Understanding Human History in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organize themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
Fire gave us power. Gossip helped us cooperate. Agriculture made us hungry for more. Mythology maintained law and order. Money gave us something we can really trust. Contradictions created culture. Science made us deadly.
In this book running over four hundred pages, the author outlines the history of humankind as a species. Starting with the unremarkable faltering journey of ancestors of the sapiens species, the author moves on along the series of revolutions that shaped the humankind as we are. Written in easy English and fast narrative style, the book is interesting, eloquent and gripping. The title being a Brief History of Humankind is a misnomer though! Essentially, Sapiens is a informative summary of our journey as a species that has brought us here.
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Interesting and resourceful. I had received the review copy from Random House India. Thank you Random House India for giving me this opportunity. You can buy this book at Flipkart in case you live in India.
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