“Sapiens: A Graphic History,” however, is child-friendly. It is beyond argument nowadays that the comic book can be enjoyed by adult readers, and some of them are literally so graphic that their intended readers are adults only. And he continues to play the role of kindly schoolmaster throughout the rest of the book, peering into or entering the comic-book frame and sharing the story-line with his young niece, Zoe, an endearing Indian scientist named Arya Saraswati, and Professor Saraswati’s mischievous pet dog.
The first lines of the graphic novel version of “ Sapiens” echo the original book, which starts with an alternate version of Genesis: “About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang.” The cartoon character who is shown to speak these lines is a caricature of Harari himself, comfortably seated in an armchair while floating in space at the moment of creation. The first volume in the series, co-written by David Vandermeulen and inventively illustrated by Daniel Casanave, is “The Birth of Mankind.”
The latest manifestation of the “Sapiens” publishing enterprise is “ Sapiens: A Graphic History” (Harper Perennial), a series that tells much (if not all) of the same sweeping saga in comic-book format. All of these intriguing ideas – and many more - are explored in depth and with wit and acuity in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind.” He points out that we have risen to the top of the food chain only by exploiting and often exterminating other animals, but he predicts that humans, too, are not long for the world. He starts by reminding us that Homo sapiens, the last surviving species in the genus known as Homo, started out as unremarkable animals “with no more impact on their environment than baboons, fireflies or jellyfish.” Our unique gift among the other fauna, which emerged about 70,000 years ago, is our ability to imagine things that cannot be detected by the five senses, including God, religion, corporations, and currency, all of which he characterizes as fictions. Harari is a gifted writer, and he is not afraid to traffic in the biggest of Big Ideas. When Fareed Zakaria asked Barack Obama what he was reading during an interview on CNN, the President sang the praises of “Sapiens.” Its visionary author, a history professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is now a much sought-after public intellectual, and his career is managed by his husband, Itzik Yahav. Consider the phenomenon known as “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”įirst written in Hebrew and self-published in Israel in 2011, the book by Yuval Noah Harari found an American publisher in 2014, quickly became an international best-seller in 60 languages, and then morphed into a kind of multi-media empire called Sapienship.
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