Sapiens

Great book. Take your time to read it. It's really packed with thought provoking paragraphs, specially the last chapters.

This was so good. I've read it twice, I will have to read it again.

Ambitious survey of human development, from our coexistence with neanderthals up to present day and speculations for the future. It's a breezy, colloquial take on a lot of different topics: biology, anthropology, sociology and culture, economics (very breezy here), scientific and industrial revolutions, world history, religion etc. Anecdotes and facts are more established for some of these topics than others -- nevertheless it's all very high level, as you would expect with this sort of scope. A bibliography of further reading would have been nice.

When this came out, most of the buzz seemed to be about his claim that pre-Agricultural revolution homo sapiens (he eschews the word humans for our species) was much better than afterwards. I didn't think this was much in doubt. It's good to realize that not every major change in human development was a net benefit to people overall.

Still, it's a good well written survey with definite opinions that will probably challenge your world-view a bit, even if you're a card-carrying secular scientific type. The author is a bit partial to Buddhism. I'll probably wait on reading his most recent book, as it seems to overlap quite a bit with this one.

I would have considered giving this four stars if the author didn't come across as so preachy and professorial.