#YUVAL NOAH HARARI BEST BOOKS SERIES#
If the TED talk is the PBS series of our time, Harari-young, slender, pale, and with a receding hairline that gives him an almost comically eggheaded appearance-makes an unsettlingly nervy, cerebral successor to Clark’s suave Oxbridge accent and Bronowski’s grandfatherly bristling silver eyebrows. Things could go terribly wrong in the future, Harari warns, unless we make a better effort to understand the past. (This was exactly how my own family saw it when we tuned into our local PBS station for our weekly serving of elevating yet digestible high culture.) Sapiens, by contrast, presents history as a series of wrenching revolutions, each contributing to our species’ dominance over the planet but at a terrible cost. The readers of The Story of Civilization and the viewers of Kenneth Clark’s series looked back over the span of centuries with reverent complacency they were absorbing humanity’s greatest and most inspiring achievements in an orderly narrative of progress, from the perspective of that progress’s highest point yet. Sapiens appeals to this old-fashioned appetite even as it revamps the genre to address the dreams and fears of a 21 st-century audience. In post–World War II America in particular, the GI Bill and a strong autodidactic impulse made books that promised mastery of “world” history (the focus was almost entirely on Europe) catnip to the general reader. In whatever form it takes, the global survey-usually delivered by a well-known, graying eminence whose scholarly credibility never impinges on his storytelling panache-promises its audience that they can whip their flabby sense of the past into shape. The ’60s and ’70s saw very popular companion books to documentary series on public television Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (which focused on art) and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (which focused on science and technology) are the best-known examples. Wells’ 1919 Outline of History to The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant-11 volumes published between 19, most of them Book of the Month Club selections. Readers have long exhibited an appetite for sweeping surveys of world history, from H.G. He has come not to congratulate us for our achievements but to deliver some inconvenient truths.ĭespite publishers’ initial skepticism toward Sapiens, its success can’t be called a fluke. Each release bumps Sapiens back onto the best-seller lists, making it the prime example of what the Guardian has called “the ‘brainy’ book as publishing phenomenon.” Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are reported to be adapting it for the screen. Harari has published two more books since then, 2017’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and mostly recently, 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century. A glowing endorsement from Gates the following spring cemented Sapiens’ status as a slow-build blockbuster by June 2017 the English version had sold 1 million copies. Dubner and Steven Levitt, explained that Sapiens wasn’t an instant hit stateside, but when Mark Zuckerberg, who had just launched a very public yearlong reading project, selected it a few months later, interest in the title began to snowball. Wachtel, who also edited 2005’s Freakonomicsby Stephen J. rights for HarperCollins and published the book in February 2015. Why? “No one had heard of him before,” said Claire Wachtel, who finally acquired the U.S. until 2014, and by the time that edition was selling like hotcakes, the book had already been turned down by 25 U.S.
The English-language version (translated by Harari himself) didn’t appear in the U.K.
Published in Israel in 2011, Sapiens quickly became a best-seller there.
0 kommentar(er)
