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Old 11-23-2016, 01:47 PM   #14
issybird
o saeclum infacetum
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I thought the Peugeot analogy was fine, except that it was too drawn out. He's not content with making a point, he had to belabor it and then go over it again. As I said, the ability to skim once the needle got stuck would have been welcome.

But this leads me to what made me think the book has its merits, even if it didn't appeal that much to me. Keep in mind that what I'm about to say applies to American universities only. But this whole book to me evoked an introductory course that's hugely popular on campus; one that freshman even with no particular interest in the subject sign up to take, because the teacher's something of a star and the lectures are discursive and entertaining. When I was an undergraduate, the comparable course at my school was Introduction to the History of Art. It was so popular that the lectures had to be given in the law school auditorium, the biggest space on campus. Outsiders would show up to listen, also.

Sapiens reads to me like the lectures from such a course. I used the word discursive above and if anything, it's an understatement. Harari takes in history, anthropology, biology, physics, sociology, economics, political science, physics, statistics and I could go on, and he'll jump millennia in making comparisons. It's mind-expanding for the freshmen I have in mind; they might consider disciplines they hadn't thought of and they start to get a sense of how they can all interconnect. I found the text to be rather squishy and unsubstantiated myself, but I don't think it matters much, if the point is to open vistas, to get the student/reader into an inquiring frame of mind and generally to light a fire under them. But at this point in my life, I'm not looking for vistas, I'm interested in specifics.

But I acknowledge that any book that covers as much ground as this one does has to keep moving; you can't have breadth and depth and still come in at a reasonable number of pages. There's an argument for breadth and Sapiens scores well in presenting a compelling panorama.

Last edited by issybird; 11-23-2016 at 01:49 PM.
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