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The cover of Sapiens

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari, 2011

Follow humanity from cognitive revolution to industrial power, and examine how shared stories, empire, money, science, and imagined futures reshaped both society and happiness.

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7 parts, about 22 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Learn how shared stories about gods, money and companies let large numbers of strangers cooperate beyond personal acquaintance
  • Rethink the Agricultural Revolution through the luxury trap, where small local improvements left later generations working harder on narrower diets
  • Test claims of progress by asking whether greater collective power made individual lives, and the lives of animals, better

Who it is for

  • Readers who want one connected story of human history
  • Readers asking why money, borders and companies work at all
  • Readers weighing what technology and growth are really for

What the summary covers

  1. An Ordinary Animal Learns to Cooperate3 min
  2. Life Before and After Farming4 min
  3. Stories Harden into Systems and Merge Worlds4 min
  4. History Was Not Inevitable4 min
  5. Industry Produces Abundance and Permanent Disruption2 min
  6. Did Greater Power Make Life Better?3 min
  7. When Power Can Redesign the Desirer2 min

Recommended by

  • Barack Obama44th president of the United States
  • Bill GatesMicrosoft co founder and philanthropist
  • Mark ZuckerbergCo founder and CEO of Meta Platforms

About the author

  • Yuval Noah HarariProfessor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
    • Born in Israel in 1976; PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002
    • Studied at the Hebrew University 1993 to 1998 (BA, medieval and military history); Oxford DPhil at Jesus College
    • Won the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in 2009 and 2012
    • Cofounded the social impact company Sapienship in 2019
    • His books have sold 55 million copies in 65 languages (all books, not Sapiens alone)

Read it alongside

  • Goes deeperPower and Progress

    Yuval Noah Harari says growth enlarged resources without deciding who would receive them; Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that in industrial Britain wages rose with output only when new tasks met stronger worker bargaining power.

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