Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Thought provoking, eye opening, engaging. The first third in particular is spectacular. This book felt like Philosophy, History, Biology and Sociology all went to an unpretentious pub to co-mingle over a cold beers with upbeat and lively conversation. It was like a little snack for a intellectually peckish mind. It raised burning curiosities that I never knew I had and discussed them with unique perspectives and interesting concepts. To think about history and humankind in the way that Harari pushes the reader to do is impressive and exciting. This book made me ponder and reconceptualize so many things - like the place of humans compared to other animals on earth, or the seemingly born-with belief that we humans are much better off now than generations before us. These unique perspectives will most certainly stay with me as a new paradigm and outlook on the world. I loved that Harari was exceptionally unbiased, or at least did an incredible job of appearing so to the reader. It seemed nearly agenda-less. Any agenda he may have had was hidden by his ability to appear impartial and able to articulate several sides of an argument. Even if/when he did favor certain ideologies (which I started to pick up on by the end), he wrote them without strong rhetoric and tended to state things plainly, evaluating all sides of a theory that may have contemporary moral controversy. He evaluated things in an unbiased non-politicized way. For example, he dissected many common conservative believes around religion, heterosexuality, and gender roles. But he provided similar de-construction of "progressive" beliefs like the scarcity of resources, benefits of progress, and the dissolution of family units. His ability to remain critically scholarly throughout was refreshing. For me it was a slower read than what I’ve been reading recently, but it’s also one of the rare books that I would plan (in fact crave) to read again one day.

4.5 stars, everything I’ve suspected is confirmed in this book.

It starts out really strong, then gets a bit rambling, and presents some of his opinions as undisputed facts.

DNF

My rating is 3.5 ⭐. I had quite a few disagreements with Harari's opinion which was written here. Also sometimes I didn't understand which party is supported by Harari because of his confusing lines and just like he mentioned that it is not always possible to consider them purely good or bad.
Despite all of these I have to say that this book made me think about many instances more deeply? More like with a different perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed binging it. I also found some books that were at Harari's footnotes to be very interesting (more books on my tbr.. yay). I would love to reread the parts I've enjoyed especially the polytheism and the ethics of AI part