My copy of this book has Jeffrey Smart's painting 'Cahill Expressway' on the cover - and it seems just right. Like the painting, the stories convey a My copy of this book has Jeffrey Smart's painting 'Cahill Expressway' on the cover - and it seems just right. Like the painting, the stories convey a feeling of disconnection, and a struggle for existence in a world gone wrong. They are too bizarre for us to take them seriously, but they are too real for us to dismiss them as meaningless. They are "elusive, unsatisfactory, hinting at greater beauties and more profound mysteries that exist somewhere before the beginning and somewhere after the end"....more
The value of this book, for me at least, was that it made me realize how little I knew about our past, despite a natural curiosity and wide reading. CThe value of this book, for me at least, was that it made me realize how little I knew about our past, despite a natural curiosity and wide reading. Continually I found myself thinking "surely that's nonsense!" and finding I had no ready answer for Harari's sweeping and often controversial assertions. Many comparisons and statistics are backed up with references, and many of these do support the text; Harari also references some sources that disagree. The website for further references has more useful links, but the additional links stop after Chapter 9 - after that, only the footnotes of the book are listed.
Clearly, the average reader isn't able to check most individual assertions, let alone the generalizations based (or not based) on them. As a single example, Harari says that people were healthier in hunter-gatherer societies than in the agrarian societies that succeeded them; but estimates of mortality rates for these societies don't bear that out.
A history of humanity will obviously need to cover much ground and it's hard to maintain a consistent level over the whole course while staying within a readable length. I feel the early chapters are stronger and better focussed than the rest of the book, even though they may misrepresent prehistory and underrate other early humans. The further the narrative proceeds, the scattier it becomes, and the last few chapters probably should have been saved for reworking into a totally different book.
Overall, I haven't been convinced by the controversial judgements that Harari makes, and I think trying to cover the whole field of human history in one work is a mistake....more
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