High level, thought-provoking ideas, lucid exposition, engaging language, and interesting examples. I would recommend this book to ANYONE.
In addition to reading, I also listened to the audiobook narrated by Derek Perkins - also highly recommended.
The book focuses on "big" history, i.e., macroscopic historical patterns and principles, rather than individual or microscopic historical events and processes. Examples include the three major unification forces of human cultures (money, empires and religions) and the interactions between science, imperialism and capitalism that buttress Western empires' dominion since 1750. Each chapter is organized around these themes, rather than around individual historical regions, eras or institutions (eg, empires and religions) which seems to be the approach of most traditional history textbooks or even university curricula (as judged from for example the course offerings in the History Department of my university: https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA15/subject/HIST).
[This paragraph contains some personally thoughts only marginally relevant to the book under review; feel free to skip it] Personally, I am utterly enthusiastic about the author’s approach while enormously frustrated about the traditional approach: the traditional approach is like stamp collecting, analogous to providing a long list of mechanical devices without teaching Newton's laws in the case of mechanics, or displaying a wonderful array of organismal diversity without mentioning the unifying principle of evolution in the case of biology, turns people into "scholars" rather than "thinkers" and defeats the overall purpose of our intellectual endeavors. IF there is some element of truth to my impression of history research and education as traditionally practiced having fallen to a lamentable state of stamp collecting, why so? As an outsider of the field I don’t know, and I am speculating that the major reason is we simply don’t know the principles with a level of certainty like that in mechanics or biology, and the minor reason is there is a culture of stamp collecting. In any case, I admire and support the author’s effort which helps to establish the “big history” approach.
Once in a while, the author jumped out of any historical context altogether and provided some sweeping accounts on some central questions of history whose relevance holds for history as a whole. Examples include justice in history (Chapter 8), the arrow of history (Chapter 9) and the secret of cultural success (Chapter 13). My personal favorite on this is the chapter on happiness (Chapter 19), which examines the following question: are we getting happier as history rolls along and our power accumulates? By the end of an informative and thought-provoking discussion, the author claimed that the subject has traditionally been shunned by historians despite its central importance and he was trying to fill the gap; I personally believe the claim and think it attests to the author’s courage and intellectual prowess.
Staying at the “big history” level, the book contains many thought-provoking ideas. Examples include the point of studying history is not to make predictions but to understand the vast possibilities of our future (in Chapter 13), and we Homo sapiens about to turn into superhumans (in Chapter 20). My personal favorite on this is Agricultural Revolution as history’s biggest fraud (Chapter 5) and the nature of human happiness and how to achieve it (Chapter 19). Connected, the two discussions tell me that humans’ choices and actions may sometimes be fundamentally antithetical and counterproductive to their long-term happiness, which holds profound philosophical and ethical implications to me.
The exposition of the book is lucid and the flow natural. To supplement and concretize the discussions on macroscopic principles, the author provided many detailed (microscopic) examples, and here he exhibited great skills in zooming in and out between the two levels and choosing most telling microscopic examples. Examples fall into several categories. In demonstrating that social orders are of an imagined nature, he carefully chose the CASES of the Code of Hammurabi and the Declaration of Independence, and the result is an informative and intriguing comparison (Chapter 6). In showing that in fact the conquered are usually part of the imperial legacies despite their sometimes great reluctance in admitting so, he drew the STORY of siege of Numantia by the Roman Empire (Chapter 11). In explaining the emergence of credit, he concocted a TALE of the fictional characters McDoughnut, Stone and Greedy (Chapter 16). Moreover, the book is scattered with examples down to the more vivid and explicit level, such as a mathematical equation of Relativity to exemplify our mathematical cognition (Chapter 7) and an ingredient list of a hand cream to illustrate the modern industrial sophistication (Chapter 17).
Occasionally for some difficult topics in the book it seems a clearer exposition would make it easier for me to understand the author’s argument (eg, on how language enabled us to enjoy competitive advantage over other Homo species and ultimately drive them to extinction (Chapter 2), and the sequence of events that got us trapped in agriculture (Chapter 5)), but having not thoroughly gone through those difficult parts a few times, I understand that it might actually be my understanding deficiency. Moreover, I am aware of some complaints over the potential handwaviness of some of the author’s arguments as exemplified by his overuse of the phrase “exceptions that prove the rule” (eg, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review). In this my thought is the following: I see an AUTHOR’s primary duty as to provoke readers’ own thinking rather than to produce bulletproof arguments (this secondary duty of an author would be the primary duty of a SCIENTIST); in other words, if the author is writing an academic paper, he might need to tighten up his arguments, and since he is now writing a general history book, I think he has succeeded in his primary duty superbly.
Lastly, I think it is hard to read through the book without noticing its literary appeal. This book is apparently an English translation that the author did himself from the original Hebrew version. The beautiful and idiomatic language adds much to the exhilarating reading experience.
The book affects me nontrivially at a personal level. Aside from the philosophical and ethical implications from history on the relationship between our decisions and long-term happiness as mentioned above, the broad spectrum of social norms described in the book broadens my ethical outlook and makes me less dogmatic about whatever ideas I used to hold as absolute principles and cherish unwaveringly (a positive change I think), echoing the point of studying history which in the author’s opinion is to understand the myriad of possibilities (also mentioned above). I feel sincerely grateful to the author and the book in this. It is in part my wish of extending this positive impact of reading this book and understanding history in general to other people that prompted me to write this review.
I can think of some minor improvements for the book. Aside from the potential refinements on the exposition and argument mentioned above, I think the book can be supplemented with more data and plots of them, to inject a more quantitative sense to the matters under study. Lastly, I think the Table of Contents should also include sections of each chapter, which I think would help us grasp the overall structure of the discourse and I provide below for the convenience of other readers. For example, with a listing of the sections of Chapter 12 on religion, one can easily see that the discussions go from the transition from animism to god-based religions, polytheism, monotheism, dualism, Buddhism and Humanism.
Table of Sections
I. The Cognitive Revolution
1. An animal of no significance
a. Skeletons in the closest
b. The cost of thinking
c. A race of cooks
d. Our brothers’ keepers
2. The Tree of Knowledge
a. The legend of Peugeot
b. Bypassing the genome
c. History and Biology
3. A day in the life of Adam and Eve
a. The original affluent society
b. Talking ghosts
c. Peace or war?
d. The curtain of silence
4. The Flood
a. Guilty as charged
b. The end of sloth
c. Noah’s Ark
II. The Agricultural Revolution
5. History’s biggest fraud
a. The luxury trap
b. Divine intervention
c. Victims of the revolution
6. Building pyramids
a. The coming of the future
b. An imagined order
c. True believers
d. The prison walls
7. Memory overload
a. Signed, Kushim
b. The wonders of bureaucracy
c. The language of numbers
8. There is no justice in history
a. The vicious cycle
b. Purity in America
c. He and she
d. Sex and gender
e. What’s so good about men?
f. Muscle power
g. The scum of Society
h. Patriarchal genes
III. The unification of humankind
9. The arrow of history
a. The spy satellite
b. The global vision
10. The scent of money
a. How much is it?
b. Shells and cigarettes
c. How does money work?
d. The Gospel of gold
e. The price of money
11. Imperial Visions
a. What is an empire?
b. Evil empires
c. It’s for your own good
d. When they become us
e. Good guys and bad buys in history
f. The new global empire
12. The law of religion
a. Silencing the lamb
b. The benefits of idolatry
c. God is one
d. The battle of good and evil
e. The law of nature
f. The worship of man
g. Humanist religions – religions that worship humanity
13. The secret of success
a. The hindsight fallacy
b. The blind clio
IV. The Scientific Revolution
14. The discovery of ignorance
a. Ignoramus
b. The scientific dogma
c. Knowledge is power
d. The ideal of progress
e. The Gilgamesh Project
f. The sugar daddy of science
15. The marriage of science and empire
a. Why Europe?
b. The mentality of conquest
c. Empty maps
d. Invasion from outer space
e. Rare spiders and forgotten scripts
16. The Capitalist creed
a. A growing pie
b. Columbus searches for an investor
c. In the name of capital
d. The cult of the free market
e. The Capitalist hell
17. The wheels of industry
a. The secret in the kitchen
b. An ocean of energy
c. Life on the conveyor belt
d. The age of shopping
18. A permanent revolution
a. Modern time
b. The collapse of the family and the community
c. Imagined community
d. Perpetuum mobile
e. Peace in our time
f. Imperial retirement
g. Pax Atomica
19. And they lived happily ever after
a. Counting happiness
b. Chemical happiness
c. The meaning of life
d. Know Thyself
20. The end of Homo Sapiens
a. Of mice and men
b. The return of the Neanderthals
c. Bionic life
d. Another life
e. The singularity
f. The Frankenstein prophecy
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