This book changed the way I think about the world, which is the same thing I said about Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Really practical guide to thinking and prioritizing in the 21st century, packed with interesting anecdotes and examples to illustrate his points. 5/5, fantastic book.

Another hit for yuval noah harari, “21 lessons” is a perfect follow-up to “sapiens” and “homo deus”. While the previous two focused more on the history and future of mankind, this one reveals the author’s insights on the individual - motivation, awareness, intelligence, and how we are influenced by education, religion, and experience. As an atheist and secularist, i found much to inspire and focus my thoughts and energy, rendered with originality, compassion, and clarity. I will continue to recommend all three of harari’s recent books to both customers and friends.

Like Sapiens and Homo Deus, this book make you think about what it means to be human. It feels more personal than his previous works. You can feel the urgency of his words on every page. Definately worth picking up.

The book was provided to me as an advanced reading copy from the publisher.

This book is not to be missed. An excellent choice for a book group discussion.

Brave, comprehensive, insightful.

Although Mr Harar is a widely respected author, this book was not for me. I was having to force myself to read this so I could post a review. There are too many books on my TBR list to spend time reading something I don't enjoy. This is not to say it is not a good book , as many have given it a good review. Just not my cup of tea.

What a terrible book. His worldview, secularism and scientism, are rampart throughout this book. His prejudices, anti-religion and anti-people, are shown throughout the book as well.
As an example he talks about secularism as seeking truth and when he mentions failures such as Stalin he says they fail to live up to the ideal. However when it comes to Christianity, he mentions the crusades and says that means it is false.
He did a lot of cherry picking in order to make his view look good and ignored facts that would contradict him..
His sections on AI are pipe dreams that will never happen.
Finally while reading his section on post truth and how everything is not true I had to stop reading and ask how do we know this is true then?
I can't recommend this book at all.

How safe from obsolescence is the job you have now? Do you have the skills to adapt in the rapidly changing Big Data environment? How will the merger of infotech and biotech affect our collective future? How can we prevent climate change from irrevocably changing the planet? What will the next global armed conflict look like? Is the recent rise in nationalism a threat to world security? How does “post-truth” (i.e., fake news) affect our thinking? Do terrorist attacks create more fear and suffering than they should? How do the stories we tell ourselves, whether religious or secular in nature, influence our behavior?

These are all questions that are clearly of concern to each of us in the here and now. They also motivate many of the “lessons” discussed in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, a volume that once again combines Yuval Noah Harari’s unique blend of history, science, philosophy, and anthropology. Unlike Sapiens, which explored mankind’s past 10,000 years, and Homo Deus, which projects humanity’s long-term future, this book purports to assess the major issues facing us in the present. Unfortunately, this exploration is neither wholly successful nor is it nearly as compelling as the author’s previous two efforts.

To be sure, there is a lot to like about what appears here. In particular, Harari’s discussion of the economic, legal, and social challenges created by the ascent of Big Data is very illuminating. Who owns the information summarizing our lives—or, perhaps more critically, who controls it—is indeed likely to be one of the major issues defining our near-term future. I also thought that the author’s interpretations of nationalism and secularism were insightful. Overall, he did a nice job of connecting several disparate themes into a cohesive bigger picture (e.g., a discussion of the importance of developing a global community is followed by an examination of nationalist sentiment which leads to a consideration of the immigration problem and then to the threat posed by terrorism).

The main problem I had with all of this is that major portions of the book were not especially original and often seemed like slightly reworked versions of arguments used in the author’s previous studies. For instance, the rise of biotech was thoroughly covered in Homo Deus and humankind’s use of rituals and ability to create useful fictions were essential parts of Sapiens. As such, there are really far fewer than 21 distinct lessons presented here, despite the volume containing 21 different chapters. Finally, the last two chapters involving the role of personal stories and the importance of meditation were woefully self-indulgent and had an off-putting pop-psychology/self-help feel to them. So, while 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is not at all a bad book, the reader might be better served by considering the author’s earlier work instead.

This book is like a collection of 21 essays that are "lessons" the author feels we need for the 21st century. I was a little put off by his views on religion. While I agree meditation is important, religion can have it's place. These lessons found within are good summaries of issues we face in tbe 21st century.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

Good book full of insights into the present and potentially the future of mankind. Robots, AI, ownership of data, understanding of ones own mind, and other important topics of interest are all mentioned and explored. I thought this book was very interesting and a mix of both fearful and hopeful. If you wonder about both present day issues our world has and what might come to pass check out this book. Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, a person who studies and writes about the past, but his latest book looks at our present and derives twenty-one lessons intended “to stimulate further thinking and help readers participate in some of the major conversations of our time.” There are a number of books, some of them very well-conceived, about the challenges presented by technology in the 21st century, but 21 Lessons for the 21st Century goes beyond that sphere. It consists of 21 chapters, each on a different subject and delivering a different lesson. Earlier versions of some of the chapters appeared elsewhere in different form. Parts I and II, on technological and political challenges presented by the merger of infotech and biotech ( a merger he covers in depth in his book Homo Deus), offer the kind of discussion and proposed remedies to be expected in a book of this title. Towards the end of Part II, though, the topics become both more social and more personal and often draw on Harari’s own experiences and interests, with chapters like Religion: God Now Serves the Nation and Immigration: Some Cultures Might Be Better than Others. The exploration of a broader range of subjects continues throughout the rest of the book: Part III, Despair and Hope, Part IV, Truth, and Part V, Resilience. The last two chapters are especially philosophical and personal: Meaning: Life is Not a Story and Meditation: Just Observe.
Not surprisingly for an author who is from Israel, Harari is especially interested in religion, and sometimes he can be provocative. For example, in the chapter Post-Truth: Some Fake News Lasts Forever, he says: “When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion.” He qualifies this assertion by saying, “I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion….For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit.”
I did not always agree with everything the author said, but he offered an interesting viewpoint and made me ponder his subjects myself. With such a broad range of subjects covered, I would expect most readers would find some of the lessons more convincing than others, but just about anyone who likes to be stimulated should find food for thought. The author has done his job.
I received an ARC of this book for review from Netgalley and the publisher.
A stimulating look at our times

I’ve read Yuval Harari’s previous books and loved them! I was skeptical at first with the title seeming like a guidebook to the 21st century. However, this book caught my attention from the first page. It’s very well written and grounded in reality. I wish every world leader reads this book and understands what human kind is facing in the age of ultranationalist movements that are erasing the progress that science has made. I look forward to reading his future books!

Society 101

Yuval Harari is well known for his books Sapiens and Homo Deus. He has decided to squander his reputation on a book called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. The basic problem is that every chapter is the subject of whole shelves of books, and putting them all in one book cannot possibly do them justice. What we have left is a set of 21 editorials, which might inform the totally uninformed, but provide little insight and no solutions. As “lessons” they are unhelpful.

He has conveniently distilled all the threats to mankind into three: nuclear war, climate change and technological/biological disruption. But only technological/biological gets examined. You’re on your own for climate change and nuclear war, which apparently don’t rate high enough for “lessons”.

Despite those three most important threats, the most common theme throughout the book is criticism of religion, mostly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, though Buddhism and Hinduism come under attack as well. Looking back from the perspective of the universe, Harari condemns all religions as pompous, pretentious, full of contradictions, and terrifically negative forces.

In his chapter on Immigration, Harari boils down the entire complex situation to three superficial “debates”:
-The receiving country must be willing
-Immigrants must be willing to adopt “at least the core norms and values” of the new country
-If immigrants assimilate, they become “us” rather than “them” and must be treated as first class citizens.
Simple, inaccurate and totally missing the real issues.

In his chapter on terrorism, Harari completely misses the point that the state has a monopoly on violence. Anyone who challenges that monopoly must be put down, no matter how many civil rights and freedoms are trampled in the process. He spends pages explaining how few people are killed by terrorists compared to traffic, war and disease. So why are we so afraid of terrorists, he asks. (Because the state wants us to be, Mr. Harari.)

In the chapter on war, he comes to the magical conclusion that we’ve pretty much done away with it. So far, the only new war we’ve seen this century is Russia taking parts of Ukraine. He says countries see too much risk in starting new wars. He completely ignores (not for the first or last time), the effects of climate change, which will result in unprecedented and massive wars as countries face unstoppable waves of immigrants seeking water and land, as countries disappear from the face of the earth, and as those that have will defend it to the death against all comers, foreign and domestic.

The final chapter is on meditation. Meditation is Harari’s solution to pretty much everything, because you can focus on what is real – what is going on in your body right then and there. He says he does this two hours a day, plus one or two months a year.

If I had to summarize 21 Lesson for the 21st Century, I would say: throw off the false faiths of institutional religions and meditate instead. Not quite what I expected, and not much help in navigating the 21st century.

David Wineberg

This book was fantastic. I loved reading Homo Deus, which is why I wanted to read this book in the first place. I was a bit cautious about the book, since the title put me off (I don't like titles that are lists), but thankfully the book is not just a big list. Instead, it's a unified whole. Each chapter flows to the next, and the topics are all interesting. I found myself interested in each topic the author discussed. He includes plenty of citations, and each chapter gave me something to chew on for the next century. We have a lot of work to do if we want to get things right in society.

I highly recommend reading this book.

I devoured Harari’s first two books and this is more of the same thoughtful, intellectual and interesting analysis. Homo Sapiens discusses the past; Homo Deus, the future; and this book the present. The organization in 21 topical chapters makes this book read like a collection of essays and ruminations, which, in many ways, it is. Always provocative.