Andrej Karpathy's Review of Sapiens

“Sapiens offers a good overview of broad trends that have shaped the human civilization from prehistoric to modern times, but suffers from inconsistent assumptions about its target audience and, due to its scope, an abundance of high-level statements that don’t connect. My chief criticism of the book is that it does seem to address a consistent audience. One minute the book discusses and explains a broad trend (e.g. the empire, or capitalism) and then abruptly dives into very specific examples from history to support its statements (e.g. a briefly alluded to specific battle during the expansion of the British empire). The problem is that as an ordinarily-educated person, I am familiar with the basic ideas such as capitalism so these sections bore me, but I am not at all familiar with the details of specific conflicts or related circumstances. As such, I spent the majority of the book either bored, or confused and overwhelmed with information that was seemingly assumed. Overall, the book