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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It's not often that your mind is blown away by a book/writer. It's not often that what you were thinking consciously and unconsciously, you find written in a book in a coherent manner. You tend to get blown away when you realise that you knew this but just never discussed it deeply with someone or gave it the amount of thought it needed.
'Sapiens' does that to you. Mr Harari is a Historian with undoubtedly astounding credentials. He is an even better storyteller though. Conveying almost whole of the human history and the subtle grey intricacies which are there for you to see but we, as a society, choose to ignore, is an art more than science. There wasn't a passage in this book where my mind diverted and I was bored. Science was never this interesting because it wasn't just science. It is a complex web of the social, economic, political and cultural history of humans, the demigods of this planet.
There are so many points in this book where you pause to think, "Holy shit! So, true! I never really thought about this, though this is completely logical." That's a very weird but good feeling.
I recommend this book to experience those feelings multiple times. Just be careful not to get yourself down with cynicism because this book could do that to you!
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