There is little surprise, then, that the book has garnered a fair share of carping and harsh academic criticism. For example, in a manner similar to that employed by sensationalistic online publications, the author proffers that wheat domesticated ancient agrarians “rather than vice versa” (Harari, 2014, p. The author moves the plot of his swashbuckling story along using far-fetched and reductionists claims about the earliest humans and their surroundings. Its popularity can be attributed to a simple reason, and that is simplicity. Despite countless negative scholarly reviews of Sapiens, the book occupies millions of coffee tables around the world.
There are scores of books like Sapiens however, unlike dull treatises written by Christian or crudely materialistic authors, Harari’s work has become an overnight success. Although the speculative reconstruction of human history makes for an interesting read, it is anything but new.
In the pursuit of this noble goal, the author presents his readers the smorgasbord of counterfactual conditionals – what could have and might have been. Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is an ambitious attempt to explain in under 500 pages the manifold forces that transformed the unassuming genus Homo into the bodacious Homo sapiens.
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