About the author
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and popular writer whose books move across very long spans of human history. His work centers on cooperation, shared stories, institutions, technology, consciousness, and the power humans gain by treating imagined orders as real.
Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was one human species among several, and not the obvious winner. Harari's account of how that changed centers on a single claim: our advantage is the ability to believe in shared fictions — gods, nations, money, human rights — and to cooperate by the millions around them.
Where to start
Start with Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. How an unremarkable ape took over the planet through stories, money, and empires — and what it's doing to us now.
