You might have heard about this book from one of the high-brow outlets, or you might have heard some criticism of it from your neighbourhood contrarian. For me it helped to get a better understanding of humanity’s history in brief, which is also—quite shockingly—the subtitle of the book. It’s dizzying to think that we humans have been around for almost half a million years, when a mere 30 seems like a forever, and our modern sense of rights and wrongs quite often isn’t even a decade old. And this is what, I think, the book excels at – in showing how arbitrary the cultures have been throughout the times with today being no exception. “Sapiens” is a quick and entertaining read, none of the parching dryness of your average history book, and I can warmly recommend to not shy away from it just because it’s not something you’d normally read. It was to my own surprise as well, that I found that life, even on a grand scale, at times can be wilder than fiction, indeed.