Mark Zuckerberg’s 12th pick for his Year of Books is Yuval Noah Harari’s catalogue of the rise of humankind, Sapiens. Humans are petty, selfish, brutal, and ambitious; we’re generous, foolish, ...

Religion provided early versions of the human story: Zoroastrian sacred texts, the Book of Genesis, the Popul Vuh. These are immensely satisfying on an emotional level; they sweep past trifling ...

Consider the phenomenon known as “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” First written in Hebrew and self-published in Israel in 2011, the book by Yuval Noah Harari found an American publisher in ...

Over the holidays, I had the opportunity to reread Yuval Noah Harari’s much-heralded 2011 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which explores how Homo sapiens came to dominate the planet by ...