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2 stjärnor
It bugs me how much I end up disliking this book. Initially it's brilliant, taking the history of humanity and flipping it to present Homo Sapiens Sapiens as, if not nothing but, then certainly to a large extent a carrier of memes, myths, genes, and even other species. The idea that we didn't consciously decide to settle down and eat grass for all time but that wheat essentially hijacked us to spread across the globe is an intriguing one, and he takes a long-term view of human history that certainly casts ideas about free will etc into a much dimmer light. It feels a lot like a companion piece to Lasse Berg's Dawn Over The Kalahari and its sequels, which I loved.
But then... he just gets lost. The trouble with a view like this is that he takes it as licence (there's human nature for ya) to apply it …
It bugs me how much I end up disliking this book. Initially it's brilliant, taking the history of humanity and flipping it to present Homo Sapiens Sapiens as, if not nothing but, then certainly to a large extent a carrier of memes, myths, genes, and even other species. The idea that we didn't consciously decide to settle down and eat grass for all time but that wheat essentially hijacked us to spread across the globe is an intriguing one, and he takes a long-term view of human history that certainly casts ideas about free will etc into a much dimmer light. It feels a lot like a companion piece to Lasse Berg's Dawn Over The Kalahari and its sequels, which I loved.
But then... he just gets lost. The trouble with a view like this is that he takes it as licence (there's human nature for ya) to apply it to everything, and the latter two thirds of the book basically feel like you're sitting in the back seat of a very talkative cab driver who's Figured It All Out and needs to tell you about it. Blah blah hunter-gatherers, blah blah capitalism, blah blah human rights is a sham, blah blah blah. He makes some interesting points, and I kinda like the irony that a book that starts out trying to say something about Homo Sapiens as a whole ends up saying at least as much about Yuval Harari in particular, but damn this book became a chore quickly.
