vamysteryfan | History and Memory

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s fairly audacious for an author to even try to unify 70,000 years of human history. Yuval Harari does it in this beautifully written, challenging, fascinating book. He puts his arguments together and then takes just that one step farther that makes you reevaluate conventional wisdom. He starts with the premise that human civilization is based on the ability to believe in imaginary things and to agree on them as a group. The groups got larger through history and we unified our imaginary agreements into larger and larger systems, such as money and religion. He and his translators did a wonderful job keeping the reader interested through some difficult chapters.

Thirty Tomorrows: The Next Three Decades of Globalization, Demographics, and How We Will Live by Milton Ezrati. I’m not a fan of the book. I thought the title was deceptive. Most of the book looked backward at history, rather than looking forward. While it was extensively researched, few of the examples were after 2010. Technological and political developments over the past five years have made some of his theories obsolete. Some of the chapters were contradictory. No matter how much the US “jawbones” other countries, it can’t change their monetary policies. He underestimates the impact of job losses and changing demographics

The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory by Michael S. Malone. A poor choice of title and an ultimately flawed book. It’s not about human memory, it’s about the devices we’ve created to store information for us. I wanted to title it “From Stones to Skins to Silicon: the epic story of our mnemonic devices.” As a reporter in Silicon Valley, he had a great seat for the development of computers. He’s excellent on those chapters. He’s a little shaky on early history.