PositiveThe Independent (UK)As a historian, Yuval Harari...belongs to the school founded by Jared Diamond...in applying scientific research to every aspect of human history, not just the parts for which no written accounts exist. In truth, Harari uses less science than Diamond. He emphasizes the difficulty of knowing in detail the lives of our remote forebears and is often content to say – of topics that are being urgently investigated by the more forensically inclined – \'frankly, we don\'t know\'. His ideas are mostly not new, being derived from Diamond, but he has a very trenchant way of putting them over ... Not only is Harari eloquent and humane, he is often wonderfully, mordantly funny ... later sections seemed weaker, but in the last chapter the brio returns as Harari considers what humankind – who developed culture to escape the constraints of biology – will became now that it is also a biological creator. Sapiens is a brave and bracing look at a species that is mostly in denial about the long road to now and the crossroads it is rapidly approaching.
Oliver Sacks
RaveThe Independent (UK)This memoir reveals Oliver Sacks as an even larger-than-life figure than I\'d imagined ... Strangely for such an adventurous giant of a man, he confesses about one third of the way through the book: \'I was timid, diffident, insecure, and submissive\'. The rest of the book bears this out, often recording his childlike delight when some great figure praises his work. Coursing through On the Move is his constant sense of joy in the natural world, in scientific epiphanies, and people in all their oddity ... He is surely one of the most singular and inspiring men of our time.
David Reich
RaveThe GuardianReich’s work can finally answer the tantalising question first posed by an British civil servant, Sir William Jones. In 1786, he discovered the kinship of Sanskrit and ancient Greek. This led to the recognition of the vast Indo-European language family – which includes the Germanic, Celtic, Italic, near eastern (Iranian) and north Indian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, etc) – but not to any consensus on how this might have occurred. Reich has now shown that the Indo-European languages and the largest single component of the genetic makeup of Europe and north India today stem from migrations around 5,000 years ago from the vast Steppe, the grass plains bordering the Black and Caspian seas ... Reich’s overall picture will, in time, acquire much greater detail – just as Darwin’s great study was a beginning not an end – but we should be grateful to him and his large team of co-workers (including his wife, science writer Eugenie Reich, who had a big role in the book’s creation) for putting the essential story before us now. It is thrilling in its clarity and its scope.
