At 400+ pages, Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind isn't brief. It isn't historically accurate either. A quick skim encounters implausible anecdotes (e.g., in Chapter 15 a silly joke about the 1969 mission to the moon is offered as fact) and technical misunderstandings (e.g., in Chapter 16 a garbled description of fractional-reserving banking). Harari's attempts to convey key concepts from the physical sciences are likewise flawed (e.g., in Chapters 7 and 14 raw equations are displayed without context, to intimidate rather than educate). The "Scholarly Reception" in Wikipedia highlights further issues.

The world needs more good explanations of important big-picture long-term issues. Sapiens isn't sapient. Too bad!

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