Book Review: Sapiens - "A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari

For a change, I thought about reading  non-fiction – to have a taste of the real world. And then I thought where to begin – there’s so much around that it’s easy to get confused. The booklover in me loving each and everything and asking my mind to buy all of them; but I did have a tight grip on my purse strings. So, while surfing, once I came across the title – Homo Sapiens, I thought why not? This would be the perfect way to start a different genre – to know about Human beings – literally our ancestors. 

The book takes us to 13.8 billion years away, the beginning time of matter and space, physics, atoms and molecules. The author has mentioned a timeline of the history which traces back to the beginning of time and then to the present and to the future. This was an interesting way of reading through the timeframe knowing what lay behind us.

The book also discusses in detail why homo sapiens are different from the other living organisms around us and what makes us different. The first man on earth is entirely different from what we are today. They did not know what to eat, how to eat and more importantly how to communicate and whom to communicate. The discovery of fire was supposedly the most ingenious breakthrough of all times. The spread of human beings in search of food and shelter transformed the way they looked, the way they lived, in fact, changed their physical appearance. As the story unveils itself, I had to remind myself that it’s non-fiction but indeed it felt like fiction to me (debatable?)

It’s really a long, long read, one needs to have enough patience to go through it. The book explains  how things are presently and why the world is like what it is today. The book finishes off on an era where the homo sapiens will be an extinct species and perhaps a new form of life would prevail in the earth, a brighter and stronger one than the humans – superhumans, maybe?

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to know about the evolution and the future of us – “The Homo Sapiens”. It is a bold and proactive book that makes us comprehend our past, present and future.