Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 29.99 NZD
  • : 9781784703936
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Vintage
  • :
  • : 0.485
  • : March 2017
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • :
  • : 30.0
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • :
  • : Yuval Noah Harari
  • :
  • : Paperback
  • :
  • :
  • : English
  • : 303.49
  • : good-very good
  • :
  • : 528
  • : PDZ
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
  • :
Barcode 9781784703936
9781784703936

Local Description

~ After reading Sapiens, I eagerly anticipated reading this with more of Harari's original ideas of origins and the future of mankind. This book does lack the spirited romp through history that I enjoyed with Sapiens but does get us thinking about the current state of the human race and then makes a tentative stab at what our future might be like.

Harari suggests that the problems that have beset mankind in the past - war, famine and plague, have now largely been solved and humans will instead focus on new goals of happiness, immortality and divinity. He then goes on to ask the age old questions: what is the soul, consciousness and the mind. He also explores the relationship that humans have with other domesticated mammals as an idea of what homo sapiens relationship with their new masters might be like.

Then he looks into our modern religion which he calls 'humanism' and how it will diminish as other religions have before it.
In the final chapters he suggests what the new species to supercede humans might be like. He makes a number of assumptions which the reader may or may not like, for example: Humans are just algorithms without free will, and that increased life expectancy will eventually lead to immortality.
Harari himself suggests that historians have only had dubious success at predicting the future so I think it is best to look at his predictions in that light. I think we have about as much chance of predicting what our species will be like in 200 years time as those 200 years before us could have predicted airliners and the internet.
However this book is still worth a read, as it suggests some new ways to think about ourselves and maybe make some predictions of our own. Peter

Description

THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER Sapiens shows us where we came from. Homo Deus shows us where we're going. Yuval Noah Harari envisions a near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and beyond - from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive power? And what does our future hold? 'Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. It will make you think in ways you had not thought before' Daniel Kahneman

Awards

Long-listed for Wellcome Book Prize 2017 (UK).

Reviews

"Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. Above all, it will make you think in ways you had not thought before." -- Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast, and Slow "Spellbinding... This is a very intelligent book, full of sharp insights and mordant wit... It is a quirky and cool book, with a sliver of ice at its heart... It is hard to imagine anyone could read this book without getting an occasional, vertiginous thrill." -- David Runciman Guardian "What elevates Harari above many chroniclers of our age is his exceptional clarity and focus." -- Josh Glancy Sunday Times "A remarkable book, full of insights and thoughtful reinterpretations of what we thought we knew about ourselves and our history... One measure of Harari's achievement is that one has to look a long way back - to 1934, in fact, the year when Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization was published - for a book with comparable ambition and scope." -- John Naughton Guardian "I think the mark of a great book is that it not only alters the way you see the world after you've read it, it also casts the past in a different light. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari shows us where mankind is headed in an absolutely clear-sighted & accessible manner. I don't normally ask for autographs but I got a bit starstruck & asked him to sign my copy of his book after we'd had a conversation for my show on BBC 6Music. His inscription reads: 'The future is in your hands' - a good thing to remember when such great changes are afoot." -- Jarvis Cocker Mail on Sunday

Author description

Dr Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and now lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in World History. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, published in 2014, has become an international phenomenon and is published in nearly 40 languages worldwide. It was in the Sunday Times bestseller list for over six months in paperback, and was a New York Times top ten bestseller.