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Sapiens offers a good overview of broad trends that have shaped the human civilization from prehistoric to modern times, but suffers from inconsistent assumptions about its target audience and, due to its scope, an abundance of high-level statements that don’t connect. My chief criticism of the book is that it does seem to address a consistent audience. One minute the book discusses and explains a broad trend (e.g. the empire, or capitalism) and then abruptly dives into very specific examples from history to support its statements (e.g. a briefly alluded to specific battle during the expansion of the British empire). The problem is that as an ordinarily-educated person, I am familiar with the basic ideas such as capitalism so these sections bore me, but I am not at all familiar with the details of specific conflicts or related circumstances. As such, I spent the majority of the book either bored, or confused and overwhelmed with information that was seemingly assumed. Overall, the book often felt as a work of a historian written for other historians, selling and supporting certain historical interpretations that the author believes to be true. Not an attempt to teach the general audience about history. I enjoyed the first part of the book dealing with prehistoric times - these chapters were fun to read, perhaps partly due to my relative lack of knowledge of this era. From there, my enjoyment of this book diminished monotonically until the end, which suddenly features several hours of philosophical musings about the point of life and happiness. If you’re looking to get a basic idea about some broad strokes of our history, you might enjoy the first parts of this book. If you’re, like me, trying to get a better and more concrete sense of what life was like in different times of our history, this book never spends enough time and depth to paint and communicate a coherent picture and you will end up disappointed. 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
2015-07-06 on goodreads.com