'I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species' Bill Gates It changes the way you look at the world' Simon Mayo 'It altered how I view our species and our world' Guardian It may be the best book I've ever read' Chris Evans 'Jaw-dropping from the first word to the last. In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we're going. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human in the perfect read for these unprecedented times.Įarth is 4.5 billion years old. It gives you a sense of how briefly we've been on this Earth' Barack Obama “Few writers of non-fiction have captured the imagination of millions of people in quite the astonishing way Yuval Noah Harari has managed, and in such a short space of time.What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? This bestselling history of our species challenges everything we know about being human.ĭiscover the book that inspired Gareth Southgate's leadership style. Jonathan Cape publisher Michal Shavit said the author has a “unique ability to look at where we have come from and where we are going”.
It could very well be some ayatollah or some pope or some ideologue who would decide what to do.” Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so’ … “If you are an engineer in Silicon Valley and you think you’re shaping the future of humankind, then you are right to some extent – your inventions are changing the agenda of everybody – but you’re wrong if you think you’re going to be the person who will decide what to do with your invention. “Technology doesn’t make religion less relevant, it just poses new questions. Religion, he said, was still extremely relevant. So people hold on to these fantasies.”Ģ1 Lessons for the 21st Century will also tackle questions including “whether or not God is back, and whether nationalism can help solve problems like global warming,” Harari said. It’s kind of a transitory phase until somebody manages to come up with a new meaningful vision for the future. “This definitely is not going to work, because nostalgic fantasies by their very nature don’t provide us with answers to the real questions we are facing. “What’s happening now, not just with Trump but with many other political crises especially in the western world, is that the political system is no longer capable of producing meaningful visions for the future, so you see nostalgic fantasies about going back to the past,” he says. “On the one hand the big question is what went wrong and on the other the big question is, ‘OK, this didn’t work out very well, so what next? What’s going to replace this vision for the world as Denmark? “Looking back, it sounds extremely naive,” Harari said. It will look at the events of the last 30 years and, specifically, “the 1990s, with all the talk about the end of history and the conviction that liberal democracy had won the ideological war, and how it would eventually spread and the entire world would come to look like Denmark or something”. The book tackles “the phenomenon of the rise of Donald Trump, and what it means in the greater context of the crisis of liberal democracy”. But it’s something we should be thinking about very carefully.” “We have no way of knowing what kind of world they will inhabit, when they will be in their 30s or 60s.
Harari said: “A good way of putting it is, ‘What should we teach children today to prepare them for the world of the 21st century?’ Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - podcast
He will, said the publisher, “help us to grapple with a world that is increasingly hard to comprehend, encouraging us to focus our minds on the essential questions we should be asking ourselves today”. Jonathan Cape said the title would examine “some of the world’s most urgent issues, including terrorism, fake news and immigration”, as well as looking at more individual concerns such as resilience, humility and meditation. Harari said: “If Sapiens was about the past, and Homo Deus was about the future and distant future of humankind, the new book is about the present, and what we need to do to prepare ourselves for the coming revolution of the 21st century.” Random House imprint Jonathan Cape acquired Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, as excitement built around the title ahead of next week’s Frankfurt book fair. Faced with a world stuck in “nostalgic fantasies about going back to the past”, where politicians are “no longer capable of producing meaningful visions for the future”, Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari is turning to the present in a new book announced on Thursday.