You’ll Have a Hard Time Picking It Up

So, Noah’s Moses here, because myths

“Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind”
by Yoval Noah Harari

“Sapiens” is about brains, that’s it. If that sounds like a knock, ask your brain why it thinks so.

Your brain immediately registers the book’s significance by its 450 page, premium 28lb satin-finish stock heft. It can be used to stop a 45 magnum slug and then beat the hit man to death.

“Sapiens” ruthlessly attacks the brain’s natural aversion to excessive thought with rhapsodic prose extolling you—thinking man. This occurs through three chapters of Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific “Revolutions,” where your big brain first wipes out mental inferiors, then subjugates plants and finally ascends to the intellectual pinnacle of indoor plumbing and Sudoku.

There is a non-revolting chapter between plants and plumbing called “The Unification of Humankind” which his editor insisted on to break up all the revolutions. It explains how pillage, plunder and piety are logical organizational partners. The piety thing is central to his totally awesome revelation that the best invention of our big brains is—this is amazing— fiction.

As he’s explaining it, you realize you’re probably actually READING fiction except obviously in his case, it’s true fiction. He says powerful made-up fictions exponentially increase collective numbers so we can crush losers with weak fictions. So you can see why this is a book for our times. You can see why Bill Gates endorses it. You can see why Yoval commands speaking fees that tempt other intellectual writers to go out and buy 45 automatics.

Yuval’s not too snotty to put colored pictures in the book, which is cool. Practically no sex bits, though. The male and female sexes are actually a fiction, too, it turns out. Except the way he explains it, it’s OK.