AUTHOR:
Yuval Noah Harari (Penguin Random House UK, 2011)
REVIEWER:
Dawn Franks, Your Philanthropy, President and 21/64 Certified Trainer
BOOK LINK: https://goo.gl/FzCAXb
REVIEW:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a fast-paced journey through 70,000 years of sapiens history. For me, it was like revisiting every history, geography, economics and sociology class I ever took. Harari’s jaunt through time is immensely readable providing his opinions on where we’ve come from and where we may be heading.
The book outlines three revolutions that have impacted humankind: the Cognitive Revolution (leading to large-scale cooperation – religion, companies, and how to thrive as humans connected) the Agricultural Revolution (the biggest mistake in human history because things were not progressively better for all humans and animals) and the Scientific Revolution (when we admitted to what we did not know and began to conquer distant shores in search of knowledge). Yet, for all our progress we may face the gravest social revolution of our history – the collapse of the family and the local community.
For me, the greatest take-away is in the last several chapters. Harari ponders our future as sapiens musing on artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and other technologies that may change us into something unknown today. He asks the final question Who are we as a species and where are we going? Answering that question will be the work of many philanthropists for generations to come.