Book Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Few years back a friend of mine said he saw a Bollywood movie star's picture with this book in his hand and so out of curiosity he picked it up to read. :-) Thus, I had heard of this book but never bothered to purchase a copy. It eventually landed in my lap when another friend gave it to me as a present. So, finally picked it up to read.

Harari names the book Sapiens, but then in the subtitle itself limits the scope to Homosapierns alone. In its breadth of coverage, book does span pretty much the entire human history starting from paleolithic age to 2015 where bionic body parts are getting attached to human beings and man/machine meld cyborgs are on the horizon. Towards the end it worries about singularity, what entity will replace human beings and so on. Author does seem to think he is writing a major piece of work that is important and relevant as indicated by the tone of the book and the aspects of human lives he is trying to touch upon. But as I was racing through the chapters, it left me a bit unsatisfied as there is no comprehensive thesis or idea that is new. It covers material most readers of my age might have already read about from high school history to simple books on anthropology. When I read a book by Jared Diamond (whose name appears on the cover with a quote from him to promote the book), I used to notice a similar breadth of human civilization coverage that used to be impressive since it will push another new idea in parallel. For example, his Guns, Germs and Steel pushed the idea of how those three things shaped human civilization as it stands today. Similarly his Collapse argued as to how civilizations that lasted several centuries or ones intended to last a millennium, collapse precipitously when they reach a tipping point. The discussions and stories covering human history will form the scaffoldings needed to understand the overall thesis of the book. I didn't find any such overarching thesis in this book. It seems to just narrate history at great length covering a large span of time and pretty much stops at that. 

There are certainly interesting tit bits sprinkled around. In Chapter 7, when the author is discussing the evolution of writing, he nicely describes how in its initial form, Sumerian writing circa 3500 BC on clay tablets helped record property/land details for tax purposes. Basically their writing combined two elements. One is a representation of numbers. They used rudimentary versions of base 6 as well as 10. (Their base 6 usage still has its fingerprints today in the 360 degrees of a circle.) Second element is a representation of things such as merchandise, animals, land, and people. This allowed them to store lot more information than what any human being can remember and recall. Thus, first writings in human history probably belonged to an accountant rather than a poet or a prophet. The pre-Columbian Andes used a totally different system to record details that some would argue should not even be considered as writing. Instead of trying to write on clay tablets, they used knots made on colourful cords called quipus. A quipu may contain several cotton or woolen cords. By tying thousands of knots on different places in a string of hundreds of cords, they could use one quipu to store possibly an entire town's transaction details. It reminded me of the Blockchain technology currently being promoted to record land details so that they can't be easily tampered with. 

Some other sections made me wince. For example in Chapter 18, he is making valid arguments about how violence has been coming down as centuries pass. But in a subsection titled Imperial Retirement, he says that by the time India was asking for its freedom in the 1940's, British empire was too ready to give up power through a peaceful transition! To quote him verbatim, "At least some of the praise usually heaped on Mahatma Gandhi for his non-violent creed is actually owed to the British Empire". I fully understand that when colonial powers like Britain invaded and took over India centuries back, that was the world norm and in fact centuries before several other invaders have taken over Britain as well. So we can't judge that history using today's values. But when fighting occupiers violently with every means you got is the world norm, Gandhi's non-violent freedom fighting movement in India that eventually succeeded deserves all the praise you can heap on it. Though you can compare some other violent era in history and argue that the amount of violence unleashed in India is comparatively less, taking away credit from Gandhi and giving it to the British empire portraying it as a benign power that was walking away on its own is totally disingenuous and a rewriting of history. Beyond Mandela & MLK, too bad Gandhi's model didn't become the norm in the world and we still continue to throw bombs at people to resolve conflicts even in the 21st century.

Overall Harari comes across as knowledgeable, capable of covering vast periods of history. But once you finish and put down the book, you may not remember very many interesting things you learned that you didn't know before. 

I am out on vacation this week and the next. So, packing Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Book by Richard Thaler in the carry-on suitcase. Let me see how it turns out. 

-sundar.