'Sapiens,' an Obama and Bill Gates rec, goes graphic novel
Yuval Noah Harari’s history of mankind ‘Sapiens,’ lauded by the likes of former President Barack Obama, is retold in new series of graphic novels
To get a better picture of the graphic novel’s significance, it’s best we take a look at the initial work that preceded it, as well as Harari’s subsequent books, each building upon that first one, which has earned global recognition, awards and staggering sales since its release.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.
Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapiens’
Published originally in 2011 in Israel, where the historian lives with his husband Itzik Yahav, the book quickly garnered international acclaim after its re-release under the title “Sapiens” in 2015. Harari tells the story of humankind as it relates to deeply seeded past events in the lifespan of the species, neatly tied throughout to our current affairs (in conversational language and frequent wit). “Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics,” summarized Ian Parker in the New Yorker, “while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility.”
I’ve personally read the book three times since it released in 2015, and a few global thinkers have also publicly lauded it. Former President Barack Obama recommended it in 2016 alongside Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad.” Bill Gates recommended it the same year, noting “It’s so provocative and raises so many questions about human history that I knew it would spark great conversations around the dinner table. It didn’t disappoint. In fact, in the weeks since we’ve been back from our holiday, we still talk about Sapiens.”
This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.
Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Homo Deus’
The sequel to Harari’s book takes us into the future, where the historian projects what might be lying ahead for mankind, both positively and negatively. The title of his new book suggests a startling stage in our evolution, Dan Falk previously reported for NBC News: Homo sapiens (“wise man”) is a temporary creature, one soon to be replaced by Homo deus (“god man”). “Harari makes no pretense of being able to peer into the future” wrote Falk, “but the advances humans have made suggest where we may be heading.”
The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.
Yuval Noah Harari, ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’
“While his previous best sellers, Sapiens and Homo Deus, covered the past and future respectively, his new book is all about the present,” wrote Bill Gates in a recommendation for the third in Harari’s Sapiens series. “The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying,” Gates wrote. “It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them.” The collection of essays and advice on facing the current century is broken into 21 distinct ideas.
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