Among the cast are a masked superhero, Doctor Fiction, who personifies “the human superpower to create and believe in fictional stories”, and a hard-boiled New York detective “investigating who killed most of the big animals of the planet more than 10,000 years ago”. Some, such as the Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, a specialist in primate behaviour, are real figures who have shaped Harari’s thinking but most are fictional. “They convinced me it’s a very efficient storytelling technique, and that it would make it easier to convey at least some of the messages if you have this guide who accompanies the reader.”Īs a compromise, they agreed to include a cast of scientists “who could explain different disciplines and present different theories – it’s important to show science as a collaborative effort and not as an individual enterprise,” says Harari. His co-authors on the new book, the French illustrator Daniel Casanave and Belgian scriptwriter David Vandermeulen, insisted Harari step into the frame. Scientists often speak in jargon, statistics, graphs, which most people find difficult – people usually think in stories On the opening page he greets us from an armchair, book open on his lap, ready for story-time later he leads a fictional niece through the complexities of evolution and his theories on how an obscure savannah-dwelling ape rose to world domination. So it’s curious to see the 44-year-old appearing in Sapiens: A Graphic History, serving as an avuncular cartoon tour guide through the early days of humanity. “If Harari weren’t always out in public,” a New Yorker profile noted earlier this year, “one might mistake him for a recluse.” Slim, bespectacled and shaven-headed, he speaks softly but insistently not just about our distant past but also of the near future of humanity and the various existential threats looming. It has been one of the most spectacular publishing successes of the past decade, selling more than 10m copies since it was translated into English in 2014, and its enormous popularity has turned a little-known Israeli history professor into one of the most influential public intellectuals on the planet.īut for all his ambition and influence, Harari cuts a rather sober figure. Sapiens covers the broad arc of our species’ story, from the emergence of human cultures in Africa 70,000 years ago to our hyper-connected present, in 500 pages.
“I try to keep myself mostly outside my books.” “I vetoed it,” he says over the phone from his home outside Tel Aviv.
W hen it was first suggested to Yuval Noah Harari that he appear as a character in the illustrated version of Sapiens, his mega-bestselling “brief history of humankind”, which is about to be published in graphic form, he did not jump at the idea.
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