Recommendations you can check.
by Yuval Noah Harari, 2011
Who uses, recommends or left Sapiens, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
7 people
Melinda and I loved Harari’s previous book, Sapiens, which tries to explain how our species came to dominate the Earth.
Gates's 2017 summer reading list entry on Homo Deus, referring back to Sapiens.
2017-05-22·gatesnotes.com ↗
The history of humankind from 2 million years back all the way until today. Fascinating read. I liked that it wasn’t just a list of events, but an overarching “theory of history”. Also enjoyed that this one topic was presented through many lenses: history, evolutionary biology, archeology, economics, even philosophy and theology.
Starred on his book list as one he particularly enjoyed or recommends.
2016-01-01·radex.io ↗
Sapiens I read recently, which I really enjoyed.
A transcript, hosted on his own blog, of his appearance on The Ezra Klein Show; Klein closes by asking him for book recommendations.
2017-11-15·abovethecrowd.com ↗
I resisted reading this popular history of mankind, because it came out when I had just finished “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches”, on the same subject. But wow - this book is at its best when the author is sharing his personal perspective about binding myths, humanism, and other ways that “truths” are not true. And you get an interesting history of the world along wi…
Rated 9/10 on his public book-notes list.
2017-08-15·sive.rs ↗
Depending on your mood, either The Sovereign Individual, Sapiens, Siddhartha, Total Freedom (JK), The Untethered Soul, or the Rational Optimist. Books are cheap, buy all and skim them for the one that grabs you.
Replying on X to a follower who asked which single book to read over the holidays.
2017-12-22·x.com ↗
Still, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human history.
Gates's 2016 summer reading list entry on Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens.
2016-05-17·gatesnotes.com ↗
Yuval Harari, Sapiens. Read half of it, then lost interest. I'm ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, it provides a useful, somewhat contrarian perspective on human history. (For example: the agricultural revolution probably sucked for the people who went through it.) On the other hand, it's full of sweeping pronouncements that I can't fully endorse.
His running "Reading Archive" page, where he logs each book, lecture series and podcast he finishes with a short verdict. The page carries no date; the newest entry on it is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (published February 2017), so it was last extended around then.
I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.
His review of Brad DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia, which he says is a rare exception to his not reviewing books.
2023-06-17·contraptions.venkateshrao.com ↗
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
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