He’s invited his 38 million followers to read what he describes as “a big history narrative of human civilisation– from how we developed from hunter-gatherers to how we organise our society and economy today”. And last month, he received the ultimate imprimatur when Sapiens was selected by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, for his online book club.
Earlier this month, he delivered a TED talk. When I meet him, he’s just been the star turn at Penguin Random House’s global sales conference. Or that he’d join the globetrotting TED-ocracy: the academic superstars who travel the world delivering keynotes on zeitgeisty topics, in Harari’s case, the not inconsiderable subject of the history of the whole of mankind.
He’s a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and there is almost nothing in his background to suggest that he would write a book that has become one of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year – Sapiens. B y rights, Yuval Noah Harari should be an anonymous academic buried in an obscure university department somewhere toiling away on his somewhat dusty discipline – medieval military history.
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