/lit/ - Literature

>>17627306
interesting premise, ultimately not amazing book, dude is overhyped big time even if it is worth reading to a degree

(((The media))) gave it a lot of publicity and attention out of sheer nepotism. NPCs swallow everything thrown at them as expected.

>>17627306
it tries to encompass too much and all you end up with is an ocean sized pool.

I don’t know about Homo deus but Sapiens was pretty good.

Read sapiens, some chapters are good, some trash. It's an easy read I find his writting entraitaining. It's a pop sci book if you know some history/anthropology it will all be stuff you probably already know, it's pretty basic. Normies love this book because all these ideas are new to them and they never read any science. The writer also gave me globohomo vibes, I gave it a 3/5 on goodreads.

>>17627397
Pretty good summary

>>17627355
That's why I haven't bothered to read Sapiens. I feel like you can not possibly cover all of human history in one book without being so shallow the whole effort becomes pointless. It took the Durant 11 books just to cover the history of Western civilization.

>>17627306
>Sapiens
ok
>Homo Deus
shit
>21 Lessons
meh

>>17627306
it's neoliberal scientism apologetics

i feel so pretentious typing that out

>>17627306
Literally no book has ever made me seethe as much as Homo Deus. I kid you not, it almost made me into an antisemite. I studied history. This book is a pathetic excuse for philosophy and a worse one for history. I can stand atheist phillosophers. Some of them I really like and I even appreciate antitheist pundits like hitchens sometimes. I cannot read any more of this smug, collosally ignorant faggot. I genuinely hope the Arabs burn his book in the street when they re-take al aqsa.

>>17627306
>Is he worth reading?
no

>Why did he become so popular with normies?
why does anything else? marketing and accessibility. it's a pop sci book filled with political/social pandering and it's promoted hard.

>>17628199
> I kid you not, it almost made me into an antisemite.
That's too bad, read it again then to make sure it hits home

>>17628199
>mfw he doesn't understand grammatical gender despite his native language having grammatical gender and thinks it literally means gender characteristics

>>17627306
I bought Sapiens for some reason and I can't even be bothered to read it. I might just bin it

>>17627306
so take this like a pinch of salt because i don't remember well but i asked to friend that studied archaeology and primarily specialized on prehistory and modern hunter-gatherers and she said that the book seemed simplistic, even to be read by people who seek just pop science material

>>17627306
Sapiens is a nice book. It gives you a quick general overview of human history. Nobody has the time to read history, anthropology, and all the other subjects to get a real in-depth overview unless they are an actual scholar, so something like this serves to provide at least a basic education that most people don't have.

>>17627306
it fits well with the bland ideas of biology taught in 200 level classes in college.
he also trashes religion and calles early Judaism a cult which made ignorant atheist bros wet

>>17628449
All religions start out as cults.
Religion is just a cult which lives on after the leader’s death.

he's J*wish

>>17627306
Highly recommend reading pic related. It's Sapiens but without the pop-sci. Only downside is it does get a little information dense at times.

>>17628231

That is its origins, words for things like night, spiders, the moon etc. are feminine in concept and tend to be grammatically feminine nouns. This must be what the IE antecedent culture had in mind otherwise why would grammatical gender exist to begin with

>>17627306
I remember trying to read sapiens a few years ago and reading like 1/3 of the book in one sitting and then never touching it again, that was 5 years ago

>>17628684
the everyday word 'gender' is not the same as the 'gender' in grammatical gender.

grammatical gender = grammatical category or type. whether or not it aligns to lexical sex/gender characteristics in a small number of words is irrelevant because it doesn't mean anything to almost all nouns. that is not how grammatical gender arose either. it's not even clear if it arose from the grammaticalisation of some (literal) gender affix like for example -ess and -woman, or if it just happens to be taken as such later on. if it is the case then that somehow got the point where every noun must have it and every word must agree in gender (e.g. adjectives must conform to their noun's gender). this is pretty normal, having information from one word be required all the time or transfering to other words (for example gender, number, person transferring from noun to verb and being required) this is not unlike requiring every noun to have grammatical number, even though it can be pointless or ambiguous, it is still required. when you wholesale require every noun to have a gender, it's obviously impossible for literal gender characteristics to be involved and you are braindead for suggesting otherwise.

I'm reading Sapiens right now and at least the first half of it is good. I like when he talks about the pre-historical topics.

>>17627306
Once a critical number of w*myn start reading a book they all do, and thus this one went big.

I'm interested in a lot of the topics discussed by Harari, and the thing that more than anything makes me skeptical about him is how no one in the relevant circles to his work ever talked/talks about him. Virtually all interest in him ever seems to be among trendy females who want to look smart.

>>17628899

Gender was likely an important concept linguistically appended to concepts in the language. In the same way that some tribal languages have affixes or articles denoting a thing as living or nonliving. Although I agree that the universality of grammatical gender causes it to be meaningless in many cases, and ofc it is meaningless in modern languages

>>17629217

Do you think reading shlock like this will make women more accessible to me?

>>17627306
I wouldn't recommend Sapiens. It starts OK but then devolves in to what feels like Harari just making stuff up without citation. It is hard to even call it pop-sci.

I'd recommend Joseph Henrick's The Secret of our Success, which focuses more on human cultural evolution, much better.

>>17628206
This

>>17629789
that's so true, second half of that book is linguistic garbage. and to think my "scientist" friend though tthat was the better half. Really shows the quality of STEM education imo

>>17628199
wat wrong with homo deus?
and also
>almost an antisemite
bro just go ahead and go 100% antisemite
you'll feel so much better when you do

>>17627306
kinda worth the read. Dude glosses over so much he doesn't concern himself with right or wrong.

Anything within the wheelhouse of anthropology is decent content, but when he stretches into economics or anything denser it's utter trash.

The last few chapters saved it from being a complete dumpster fire.

>>17629666
not unless you kiss she full belly

>>17630374
>last few chapters
oh boy.
it just felt like name-calling. The first part of Sapians is basically explaining optimality theory, which is the only acceptable theory in biology
or are you talking about homo deus, the lsat few chapters of which are just physicalist apoligism and where he almost explicity starts his little dataist cult
quite honestly those books are fundamentally misleading, and no one should read them except to philosophically demolish them

>>17627397
The breaking down humanism into 3 factions unintentionally redpills on the problems of critical theory.

>>17627306
Absolutely not. My gf reads it which tells a lot. For the most part it's middlebrow shit for NPCs who have never read a book.

>>17628238
It's pretty good up until he starts projecting the future. The most interesting section is on the revolution of banking during imperialism. When you take a western civ course they focus far more on religion than economics

>>17627306
>Homo-sapiens
>Is actually written by a Homo-neanderthal

>>17627397
Well the author is gay and Jewish, what more do you need

>>17627306
Iran banned Sapiens because they thought that author distorted history or some shit like that.

>>17627306
Sapiens is well written and worth reading for most people, who really don't know much at all about history and anthropology.
Yes, this includes 99% of /lit/ (just because you can post 'nigger' here doesn't mean you aren't a clueless normie).

You're certainly free to disagree with his ideological positions, but first you need to understand what he's talking about.

generic "sophisticated" anglo-jude globalist shilled by various (((media outlets)))

>>17628684
>This must be what the IE antecedent culture had in mind otherwise why would grammatical gender exist to begin with

Explain why gendered language exists in non IE tongues then

this board knows nothing about history and anthropology but is going to act like they're more well read and knowledgeable enough to critique something they haven't even read. lmao

>>17632734
He calls religion what it is: a fantasy.
Obviously Iran won’t be okay with this

People call it globohomo blue pilled but I read it and it’s pretty Eurocentric (not that I like this term. It’s just what people would call it these days.) he basically says Europe conquered the world because they had superior ideas (particularly: individualism) than the Asian cultures had. If you tried to say this on a classroom they might even call you a racist... such is the state of our universities

>>17627306
>Kike
>Faggot
>Inspired by Jared Diamond and Germs, Guns, and Steel
>Thinks that Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so
>Vegan

What do you think?

>>17627306
His writing is nice, but his books get pretty serious criticism from actual academics. Seems like he runs into a problem a lot of laypeople do where they take some generally agreed upon basic fact in a field and way over extrapolate it to mean and imply things no expert would agree with.
Maybe worth it if you hang around the types who really care about discussing whatever the hot new pop lit is, but if thats the case you need to find a new social group anyway.

>>17627306
>globalist
>atheist
>vegan
>gay
>muh science

Should tell you why normies think he's a genius

>>17633917
I don't need to know all of history and anthropology to know this book is a steaming pile of shit, meant for the most drooling of retards.

>>17627306
homo deus is utter shit and cringe
sapiens is ok if you're 18 and starting to get into nonfiction

>>17628199
F I L T E R E D
I
L
T
E
R
E
D

>>17627345
This. Any work you see shilled on shows, reading tables, etc. inevitably turns out to be something propped up like this.

>>17632709
Also buddhist.

>>17632709
>>17639928
Oh, and vegan!