In a 2018 Jakarta Post interview, Yuval Noah Harari recommended five books for making sense of the world.
Source: “5 books Yuval Noah Harari wants you to read”, The Jakarta Post, July 21, 2018.
In the World State of A.F. 632, people are grown in hatcheries, sorted into castes from Alpha to Epsilon, and conditioned from birth to love their place. Stability is kept not by terror but by pleasure: easy sex, endless consumption and a drug called soma that dissolves any bad mood.
Why Harari recommends it. He described it as the most prophetic book of the 20th century, arguing that many people today would mistake its world for a utopia.
Power and Sex among Apes
De Waal spent years watching the large chimpanzee colony at Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands and recorded how its members competed for rank. The story centres on three adult males, Yeroen, Luit and Nikkie, whose shifting alliances decided who led the group.
Why Harari recommends it. He said it completely changed how he saw both chimpanzees and humans, and he called it probably the funniest science book he’d ever read.
The Fates of Human Societies
Diamond asks why Eurasians, rather than Native Americans, Africans or Aboriginal Australians, ended up with the guns, germs and steel that decided history. His answer is that environments, not biology, shaped the fates of human societies.
Why Harari recommends it. This is probably the most important one for him personally. He credited it with turning him from a historian of medieval warfare into a student of humankind. You can see its influence directly in Sapiens.
The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Pinker argues that the gloomy picture most of us carry around is flat wrong. Using about seventy-five graphs, he shows that life, health, wealth, safety, peace, knowledge and freedom have all improved dramatically since the Enlightenment, and explains why the news and our own minds hide this from us.
Why Harari recommends it. He said there is plenty to argue with in it, and that this is what makes it interesting. That fits, since his own outlook is noticeably less optimistic than Pinker’s.
The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Tim Wu traces the business of harvesting human attention and reselling it, from a penny newspaper in 1833 through wartime propaganda, radio, television, AOL, Google, Facebook and Instagram.
Why Harari recommends it. He praised it as an insightful history of modern information technology and its political effects, from print and radio through Google and Facebook. That theme shows up again in his 2024 book Nexus.
The list is a good picture of how he thinks. It combines big-history synthesis, primatology and evolutionary thinking, a dystopia about control through pleasure rather than fear, and the politics of information.
