audio cd
Published Feb. 10, 2015 by Tantor Audio.
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 …
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.
