This is as good as popular non-fiction gets, what a journey! The breadth and scope of this book was staggering, and yet I never once felt overwhelmed or bogged down by the material. Imagine a sort of "Guns, Germs and Steel" but dedicated to the entire history of humankind. Along those lines, "Sapiens" is a cultural/anthropological history--Harari doesn't spend too much time talking about specific wars and events--it's about the underlying forces of these events.

"Sapiens" boils human history down to three revolutions: the cognitive revolution was when homo sapiens developed fictive language and were able to forge myths that fostered mass cooperation; the agricultural revolution (which Harari has dubbed: "history's greatest fraud") taught us to mechanize and manipulate nature to our ends; and the scientific revolution which led to our capitalist-industrial philosophy of perpetual invention and "growth". Interestingly, the industrial revolution is deemed more of a "sub-revolution", as it gets absorbed into the section on "The Scientific Revolution".

I was surprised to see some of the reviews claim Harari has a a capital 'A' Agenda, as if "Sapiens" is an opinion piece. I think this is more of a case of having their feathers ruffled by his very provocative arguments, rather than any shortcoming on the author's part. Sure he has an agenda (why write a book if not to make a point?), but the book rarely strayed into making any sort of value judgement, and I thought Harari made a very strong case for his sometimes counter-intuitive theories.

However convincing you may find the main arguments of "Sapiens", there is no way you'll walk away from this book unchanged. It will make you think! I feel like I have a much better understanding of the world after reading this book, and since that's my main criterion for judging the worth of a book, I give it 5 stars.