An interesting book about an important topic: humans' place in the grand scheme of things. It does what it sets out to do: it gives perspective, also considering ecosystems and nonhuman animals.

The book questions how humans tend to place themselves above all other forms of life. It also discusses, among other viewpoints, how humans have influenced the ecosystems around them even before historical times. Many of the discussed events and phenomena were somewhat familiar to me, but there was some completely new information as well. For example, I knew that money is just a social construct, but this book helped me situate this piece of information in a wider context of humans' imaginary orders. I also learned about empires I had never heard of, such as the Safavid Empire.

"One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations." (p. 87) I found this idea very compelling because it is very true in our current industrialised, affluent societies. You see it constantly in consumerist, capitalist systems.

Despite the broad and complex topic, this book is written in a very plain way. For me, this was also one of the major weaknesses of the book. Probably making the book as approachable as possible, the style is very light – at times, annoyingly so. More importantly, since the topic is so massive and complex, to produce this quite clear picture, Harari has had to simplify things A LOT. Often, they also remind the reader that this is just a theory or there are other, differing views within the scientific community about a certain topic, but still the outcome is smoothed out to be presented as a unified narrative.

While it was interesting to read, I constantly had a nagging feeling that many shades of grey, attenuating circumstances, etc. were left undiscussed for the sake of clarity. But since I am not an expert in the topics the book discusses, it's very hard for me to assess the contents. For example, in the beginning of the book, Harari mentions in passing that while other animals have languages as well, the Homo Sapiens language is by far the furthest evolved. While the latter (and the more important) part of the statement is true, as a linguist, I know that the truthfulness of the first part is very much contented and depends on the definition of language, which Harari doesn't give. But I get why, it's just a sidetrack. However, I kept thinking how many other details like this I missed because I'm not a biologist or historian or whatever.

Another problem I had with the book at times was it's outlook on certain matters. For example, Christopher Columbus is named as a genius on page 272. This irked me. Science was constantly discussed as natural sciences – even though the author is a historian. There were many parts were it would have been obvious to at least mention qualitative approaches (such as the research on happiness), but they weren't. However, I think that this problem was partially due to my idealistic and subjective thinking clashing with the central/neutral-seeking tone of the book – and the fact that many of the trajectories and phenomena were painful to read.

I was also mildly annoyed that Harari uses BC and AD instead of BCE and CE when otherwise the book takes a very... well, scientific stance on religion. There were other similar, small discrepancies in the book as well. As another example, the word archipelago was explained but the word dogma wasn't.

All in all, this book was entertaining and thought-provoking. If I had read it about 10 years ago, it probably would have blown my mind.