Sapiens

Main Review:

This would really be the time for a joke about having not written a review since last year – but given my last review went up over 2 months ago, I think it’ll be best to just jump straight back into things. Looking back over the last year, it seems that the biggest change 2019 brought was binding me completely to the life of a London-dwelling commuter. And as I’m sure we all know, the final initiation rite of becoming a commuter is reading a “proper commuter” book. The sort of book you see advertised at train stations or on stands in WH Smith. Often, these are thrillers, grisly tales of murdered women and brooding men (We don’t have time to unpack why these sort of commuter books are so aggressive and bleak!). Other commuter books are “brain books”, the sort that you’ll be sure to have just on top of your stuff in your bag so everyone notices it as you’re squished into yet another hot carriage run by yet another useless train company. The sort that you think makes you seem somehow more cultured than your coffee-sipping compatriots.

The hereditary monarch of these books, it seems, is Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind. Despite coming out in 2014, it’s still #6 in Amazon’s ‘most read’ non-fiction chart – only really beaten by Adam Kay (of This is Going to Hurt fame) and Michelle freaking Obama herself. Given that the world and their dog seems to have already read the book, it seems more than a little superfluous to throw my thoughts into the ring – but it’s 2020 now, and you knew what you signed up for when you clicked on the link.

Stepping into Sapiens I was almost immediately hit with the idea that I was reading the book version of a TedTalk, it’s full of pithy phrasing and clever connections but it ultimately just feels so bland and technical. This is by no means an academic text but it seeks to present itself as definitive knowledge. It reminded me of those history or politics undergraduates (almost always boys) you’d find in pubs, desperate for any chance to show off a ‘cool little fact’ over a pint. The book is full of entry level concepts, lots of ‘life is a social construct’ this and ‘you see everything through a lens of ideology’ that. I’ve nothing against that in principle, it would be a good way to introduce these ideas to a wider audience, but the book seems to present these ideas as being at the cutting edge of social science, which feels more than a little disingenuous.

My second big criticism probably stems from the fact that the last history book I read was Insurgent Empire, which stressed that we can’t permit people to sweep the evils of imperialism under the carpet, as the suffering it caused was beyond measure. Harari sweeps in to say that yes ‘colonialism = bad’ but it gave us ‘art’ and therefore it’s morally acceptable. He seems to question the reader with ‘if empires are bad – what does that say about us?’ – not willing to accept the perfectly valid opinion that it means that we’re bad. It whitewashes history more than any book I’ve seen recently, which I’m sure will be justified as done in the need of brevity, but the book does go hard on the idea that a mix of Western Benevolence and miraculous surrender brought the end of Western Imperialism. As if the East India Company sat down one day and said, ‘this oppression lark’s not very sporting, shall we go home and have a cup of tea?’. What makes it worse is comparing these flippant sections to the lengthy, hyper detailed descriptions of the domestication and raising of animals and the suffering imposed upon the animals involved. As a recent convert to vegetarianism myself, I’m not saying that he’s not right to bring up the environmental and moral issues of eating meat, but he speaks about this with such force and passion that you’re left with the unfortunate idea that he cares more about the lives of animals that went extinct thousands of years than he does about the pain and oppression inflicted upon other human beings less than a century ago.

Overall, Sapiens puts me in a bind. I was deeply underwhelmed with it, but I don’t know how much of that was personal to my experience. I do not doubt that there are many people who have enjoyed the book. All I can say to sum up is that if you do want something to scratch this historical overview itch – try ‘History of the Entire World I guess’ – much easier to quote.