Excellent author, easy to read. Some say it's not as good as his previous two books, but the bar was set pretty high. My guess is the author isn't very religious 😉. If you're one of the close-minded delusional majority, get ready to have your bubble burst, he doesn't pull any punches. He makes a lot of sense, so if you don't have any, well, let's hope this sinks in. I'm surprised the apologists haven't chimed in yet... Well, it's still early...

I have very much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari's two previous books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, which were among the best books I have read in my life (and I read a lot). But 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is even better. It is the author's magnum opus, the best attempt to date to make sense of life in the digital age. If most people around the world read and tried to really understand this book, the world would surely be a much better place.

21 Lessons for the 21st century is not comparable to Harari’s previous landmark works of history and prognostication Sapiens and Homo Deus. Written with the purpose of focusing not on the future nor the past but on contemporary civilization, Harari tends to make sweeping assumptions and badly reasoned arguments when he is not flat out contradictory. Even worse, most of the content is the sort of generalizations seen in futurist websites and Facebook groups. It’s not so much that it’s false as that it’s not new.I will try to summarize some examples of why I think this book is a poor relative to Harari’s previous works. Harari argues that elections might be infeasible in the future. Why? Because if elections were about reason then obviously we would appoint a committee of experts to choose our leaders. Since we don’t, elections must be all about emotions which, as seen in 2016, are increasingly going to be controlled by AI. Therefore, per Harari, elections will become passé. He does not consider that, like guessing the number of coins in a jar, elections might be held because, when you combine millions of voters responses, individual biases in reasoning will balance each other out and you will arrive at the best answer.Another example: AI will soon create works of art superior to humans. This is because Harari asserts that art is all about the emotions and so AI will be able to manipulate these emotions better than a human artist. However, when I, for one, read Aeschylus I don’t experience much emotion but do enjoy the incredible craftsmanship and artistry of a creative genius. Many patrons of the arts I think would agree.Lastly, the book concludes with Harari explaining that all meta-narratives—Christian, liberal, communist, Islamic, etc.— have been proven wrong by modern science. Even the stories of personal identity we tell ourselves—what we were like as children and how that made us into the adults we are today—are bogus because there’s no human soul that would make different times in our life into a unity.So, having dismissed all personal narratives, Harari then goes on to tell his own story about how Buddhist meditation led him from being a confused and stressed teenager into the confident author of Sapiens and Homo Deus. Doesn’t Harari see that he cannot recommend mindfulness meditation as the correct response to personal suffering by telling a story if several pages earlier he said that personal narratives are illusory?Harari is a talented writer and one can enjoy reading this book as an intelligent man’s musings about the contemporary world picture. But it simply cannot be considered in the same light as his previous monumental achievements.

Yuval Noah Harari’s name came up when a few years ago a friend urged me to read Harari’s best-selling Sapiens, which I have put off, but since reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, a book that reads more like an essay collection, than a outright book (not a bad thing in this case), I do want to feast on all of Harrari’s books. I had to underline close to a hundred cogent insights throughout the book.If anything unifies these essays--ranging from religion, morality, AI, terrorism, universal basic income, freedom, equality, meditation, nationalism, post-truth fascism, Trumpism, justice, secularism, and education—it is Harari’s desire to use his expertise as a historian, and by turn, a futurist, to equip us with the tools, attitudes, and moral approaches to moving forward in the 21st Century, shedding unwanted baggage such as fundamentalism, nationalism, racism, and other “isms.”In his Introduction, he brilliantly begins: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. . . . As a historian, I cannot give people food or clothes—but I can try to offer some clarity, thereby helping to level the global playing field.”He warns us that the liberal secular vision of humankind moving forward with the powers of reason has taken a huge hit with the nihilism of Trumpism.Taken as a whole, Harari’s book is intended to give us the tools to ward off nihilism, arrogance, and primitive “isms” and to become a fully realized modern human being. Highly recommended.

Thought provoking, honest, researched, beautifully written for the easy perusal of the average layman. Looking forward to Dr. Harrari's next exciting book.