[issybird]

This was kind of a mixed bag for me. I ended up giving it three stars at Goodreads because I saw the appeal of it (I'll post about that later), but after a strong start, it didn't really fit my parameters of what I wanted.

The good: it was easy to listen to, even with the dreadful Hoopla app. I really enjoyed and was illuminated by the beginning. I know little of pre-history and I found it fascinating. But as the book progressed, it got increasingly squishy; much speculation based on little evidence, as far as I could tell, starting with identifying the hunter/gatherer stage as the lost golden age. Harari also tended to belabor his points (not always a bad thing in an audiobook, as I never felt I'd missed much when I zoned out!) and seemed to regard the reader as ignorant in every discipline. The discussion of currency is just one example. We get it. He also contradicted himself - as when he said there was no point to the French Revolution in terms of increasing happiness, which ignored his own comment on the broke mother who won a small lottery and experienced a permanent increase in well-being. Indeed. A mention of Maslow in the context of the French Revolution would not have been amiss.

Once Harari got to modern history, I thought he lost his mooring. I didn't think he had anything particularly penetrating to say; he used a very general history as the basis for his riffs on anything and everything and they did little for me. In the end, I didn't see the thrust of it all; admittedly it's hard to have a thrust when covering such vast territory. Mostly I was disappointed, as I'd expected history with mostly an anthropological bent, but Harari's multi-discipline approach obfuscated that aspect.

Still, as I said, I do get its appeal and I'll get to that.