Last semester, I took a class called “Welcome Lecture”. The class was divided into several parts. One of the week’s class was taught by our headmaster, who is also a professor in history. We all know what our headmaster looks like, therefore there is no need for me to describe him. That is how a professor in history should be like (or widely regarded as): senior, well-experienced, etc. Our author Yuval Noah Harari seems to be different. Born in 1976, graduated from Oxford, currently a tenured professor at the Hebrew University. To be honest, I think he is quite young to be a tenured professor in history. Well, young professors are not rare cases. As far as I know, there are some intelligent people became professors in Maths, physics or whatever, but it is rare for a person to become a professor so quick in humanities as it may need some time for them to researches. Anyway, let us start to talk about the book itself.

Just like the name, the book tries to figure out what was going on in human history. The book is trying to list the reasons which lead to the modern human beings’ behaviours, thoughts, etc. As a book about history, it does not focus on what happened in which year, or what led to something, instead it focuses on “Human” itself. The focus is neither on certain countries, nor certain races. If I could use an exaggerating example, that the author is an alien. He has been witnessing whatever happened on Earth, and he is reviewing the evolution of human race, how human, started from a normal species to the top of the food chain. This may explain why the author became a tenured professor at a quite “young” age. It is very simple: he used different ways of views. Not by studying something as a human being, but with a “God’s view”.