(“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text-or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs-evolution, agriculture, economics-while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller then, as “ Sapiens,” it became an international one. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare-but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world-wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years.

In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching.

Harari books