Sapiens was a good book overall - it put together the high-level facts fairly well into a coherent and entertaining story. However, that story was also very zeitgeist-y and ideologically skewed, he really tried hard to work the "Out of Eden" story whereby the human race has fallen from our great past into our miserable modern life.<p>In fact, he had to contradict himself to push that story. In one case, he describes how agriculture is worse for the farmer, because he was sedentary and if the crops failed, he could not move and faced a famine, whereas hunter-gatherers could move. In an earlier part of the book, he describes how hunter-gathers moved over a relatively small area (20x30km IIRC?). But of course, if there was a drought in a world of hunter-gathers and they had to move, they would just move where there is another tribe already, so the drought would cause war, rather than famine. That was never mentioned, it's just assumed there was random free land everywhere.<p>But the biggest weakness of the book seemed to be his very weak appreciation of the physical sciences, ie he tried to tell the 75,000 year history of humanity, without bothering to spend any time on the context. Much of history is tightly coupled to ecology, advances in tech, demographics etc and his just glides over that. In one particularly idiotic part, he seems to imply that one day, someone just randomly invented math for no particular reason. Hard to tell if he was being glib or actually believes it.<p>I'll probably give his one a go as well, even though it'll probably suffer from the same issues. For example, it's very in-vogue to view the development of intelligent systems as inventions of capitalist who seek power over the people, rather than the discoveries about the nature of reality. I find the latter much more interesting.