I am not able to answer global questions about books from the category "which book would you recommend reading to all people of the world?" or "the book that turned your life upside down", but now I have the answer to one of a series of similar questions, namely, "which book must be included in the school curriculum". "Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind" by Harari is not only an answer to a whole series of questions about the world, man and the school curriculum, which terribly lacks interdisciplinary connections and understanding of why you need to drive a mountain of information into your brain from the structure of the infusoria-slipper to the causes of the Caribbean crisis, but also a perfect example of what modern popular science literature looks like, how to correctly look for answers to global questions and just speak, write, think not according to canonical samples of Russian literature of the 19th century.
The main question of Yuval Harari, the answer to which was the writing of "Sapiens: A Brief History of mankind" sounds very interesting and intriguing: how did it happen that homo sapiens, who was neither the largest, nor the strongest, nor the fastest, nor the most actively reproducing animal, eventually became the "crown of creation" and "lord of the Earth", crushing or destroying the rest of living organisms?
No less interesting are related questions, such as: why sapiens, if there were other representatives of the species, not much different from our ancestors? has man become happier in the process of evolution and development of civilization? what awaits these very sapiens in the future, what will be the next revolution that can turn everything upside down? etc .
Harari is a historian, but I cannot say that "Sapiens" is a purely historical book, because we have a pleasant mix of history, biology, sociology, archeology and other sciences, corrected not by an abundance of terms and complex diagrams-tables-graphs, but by light humor and reflections of the author on a given topic.
To my shame, I can't boast of knowledge of biology or world history at all, at least at the level of the school curriculum, ask me where and when Assyria or Thrace existed, I'll just spread my hands (and even the charming "Accelerated course of World History" by no less charming John Green did not help).
And as for the ancestors of modern man, so in my firebrand for a long time there was a picture from a school biology textbook, according to which one ancestor evolved into another and eventually turned into Homo sapiens - the only representative of his kind (sorry, Neanderthal, sorry, Denisov man, other dudes whose names I can't even remember, you're sorry at all!), so Harari's detailed essay was a great way for me to sort something out and get interested in those questions that could never have arisen simply because of lack of awareness.
The whole text can be divided into several parts according to which of the revolutions that changed the position of a person is in question. Harari speaks of three: cognitive, agricultural and scientific, while insisting that we are now on the threshold of the next one, obviously capable of turning a person into something else (for example, a cyborg of some kind).
For me personally, the first parts, in which it was still about people of the primitive communal system, were more interesting: more new, more questions, fewer and so understandable details, with which the story about humanity in our era sins.
But this does not mean that when reading about the third revolution, I had to get bored, because when building a narrative, the author always tries to introduce some kind of intrigue, for example, he starts with generally accepted opinions, explains how they developed, and then shows that everything is far from as unambiguous as it seems at first glance (I personally liked the chapter about imperialism).
Another fresh topic for our world is colonialism: on the one hand, how much grief it brought to the natives of different localities, on the other hand, there are those who can be said to be "lucky", the standard of living has increased, the dying culture, languages, writing have been studied by the inquisitive minds of Europeans.
The difference between "Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind" from many other popular science books is that we are not looking at the result of reading a lot of scientific articles on certain topics, not a meta-analysis of data obtained by other researchers, narrow specialists in a particular field, but a subjective opinion, an author's concept, which is based both on other people's articles and monographs, and on our own idea of this world.
There are opinions that Harari, in order to make his concept more reliable, takes the necessary data and closes his eyes to everything inappropriate, freely handles figures and facts. I believe it willingly, but I can't catch it by the hand, and the question is global: who doesn't? Where are these honest scientists, I want to look into their eyes?
Sometimes the prophecy about a human being as a species of mammals, who fancied himself the devil knows what, was somewhat annoying, Harari, an animal rights activist (or maybe Harari, a vegetarian), who, of course, is right, but who would like it when they poke all sorts of unpleasant things in his eyes, often got into the text.
In all other respects, the author and his text seemed to me terribly cute and undoubtedly worthy of attention, now I am even more looking forward to appearing in electronic form.
473.530 SRY