“They came to power very violently and lately so they feel extremely insecure about their position. But whereas sharks and lions evolved over millennia to take their place at the top of the food chain, Harari compares us to “banana republic dictators” who just got here. He zips from subject to subject, through thousands of years of human history, alighting on whatever seems to take his fancy but gradually builds up a picture of us as… well, as what exactly? As more successful monkeys, basically, so successful that we’ve enslaved all the other animals and bent the planet to our will. My transcript, which is usually a mess of elipses, reads like it’s been lifted off the page.
This is entirely characteristic of the way that Harari speaks. Now we have a more global world, you need the history of the whole of the global world, not of a particular country, or religion, but the history of humankind as a whole.” You establish an independent national state and the first thing you do is to write a history of that state. “In a way, it’s like in the 19th century with the rise of nationalism. But then, the book’s success, and the way that Harari has been taken up by the global tastemakers, makes sense in that he considers himself a historian of globalisation.
Since then, however, its success has been swift and resounding: it became a bestseller in Israel and has gone on to be published in 20 countries around the world. The book was based on an introductory course on world history he taught when none of his more senior colleagues wanted to take it on, and it was turned down by almost every major publishing outfit in Israel before finding a receptive editor. Academic superstardom seems to have caught him by surprise as much as anyone. Its scope is so hugely ambitious that I had expected Harari to be one of those overconfident telly historian types, all male ego and a crushing sense of certainty, whereas, in the flesh, he’s a slightly nerdy, more thoughtful figure. That’s a workable description of what Sapiens is, though it’s a history book only in the sense that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is a physics book ( Sapiens’ subtitle – A Brief History of Humankind – suggests that this is not entirely coincidental). He’s invited his 38 million followers to read what he describes as “a big history narrative of human civilisation– from how we developed from hunter-gatherers to how we organise our society and economy today”. And last month, he received the ultimate imprimatur when Sapiens was selected by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, for his online book club. Earlier this month, he delivered a TED talk. When I meet him, he’s just been the star turn at Penguin Random House’s global sales conference. Or that he’d join the globetrotting TED-ocracy: the academic superstars who travel the world delivering keynotes on zeitgeisty topics, in Harari’s case, the not inconsiderable subject of the history of the whole of mankind.
He’s a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and there is almost nothing in his background to suggest that he would write a book that has become one of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year – Sapiens. B y rights, Yuval Noah Harari should be an anonymous academic buried in an obscure university department somewhere toiling away on his somewhat dusty discipline – medieval military history.