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They are worth reading, not simply because they are such a phenomenon, but on their merits alone. By 2018, Sapiens had been translated into nearly 50 languages and sold over 10 million copies worldwide, while Deus has reached over 30 translations and several million copies.
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(His follow up book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is perhaps less worth discussing.) The books are clever, readable, challenging, discombobulating - and monumentally successful. First in Sapiens, published in 2011 and in English in 2014, and then in Homo Deus (20), Harari, an Israeli historian, takes the reader from the Big Bang to a fantastical, vaguely dystopian potential future for our species. Such fresh, unfamiliar, biologically- and environmentally-attuned “big history” does not come bigger - in several sense of the word - than the works of Yuval Noah Harari. Your information is being handled in accordance with the ABC Privacy Collection Statement. Either way, the reader is left in no doubt that the key to human history lies in the use (or abuse) of our physical environment. This can be microcosmic - such as the way Kyle Harper has explained The Fate of Rome in the fifth century, or Geoffrey Parker the Global Crisis of the seventeenth century in terms of climate change and disease - or it can be macrocosmic - as with Jared Diamond’s biogeographical history of the last 15,000 years, Guns, Germs and Steel, or Ian Morris’s framing a similar story in the human ability to generate energy in Why the West Rules - for Now. It is far harder to tell the tale of human history as one of “Great Men” or “Big Ideas” or “Economic Forces” without paying due attention to the physical stage on which we strut. We are more aware than ever before of humanity’s material, biological, and environmental context, of our simply-just-another-part-of-nature nature. Second, history has taken a decidedly material tone - not in the sense that Marxist history was always material, but in a still more basic sense. Now, it is common knowledge, one of those historical facts that casts long shadows over the future. When I was growing up, the technical superiority of China up until about 1500 CE was never mentioned, hardly even known.
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Now no longer as sure about where we’re heading, we want to look again, afresh, at where we have been, if only to provide us with some clues. History is a bit more interesting, a bit more open, a bit more unpredictable. A few enthusiastic prognostications aside, the rise of China, and the political convulsions and economic stagnation of the West over recent decades have seen history veer off the path that so many - especially twentieth-century Westerners - believed it was stuck on. First, history is no longer in the business of converging on London or Washington. There are any number of reasons for this turn in historical events, but two strike me as particularly relevant. Their efforts sell well, if not quite in biblical proportions. Of late, however, this sacred mantle has been assumed by historians whose narratives like to begin with the origins of life, the formation of the earth or even the moment of the Big Bang. For millennia, holy texts and epic poems have led listeners from horizon to temporal horizon, explaining who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. Humans have always liked the big picture.