56 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
“Paul? Susan! From the gym? I showed you how to use the elliptical?
We went for coffee? One thing led to another? We started
dating? Then we got married? We had two kids? But we got divorced?
I got custody? You see them on the weekends? But you want them
for Christmas? I said no way? You called me last night in tears? Susan!”• •
were often disapproving, and still are:
“They say, ‘You teach the French Rev-
olution, and if somebody looks out of
the window they miss the revolution’—
all those jokes.” Gunn said that “Oxford
makes sure people study a wide range
of history, but it does it by making sure
that people study a wide range of differ-
ent detailed things, rather than one
course that goes right across everything.”
Harari agreed to teach the world-
history course, as well as one on war in
the Middle Ages. He had always hated
speaking to people he didn’t know. He
told me that, as a younger man, “if I had
to call the municipality to arrange some
bureaucratic stuff, I would sit for like
ten minutes by the telephone, just bring-
ing up the courage.” (One can imagine
his bliss in the dining hall at a medita-
tion retreat—the sound of a hundred
people not starting a conversation.) Even
today, Harari is an unassuming lecturer:
conferences sometimes give him a prize-
fighter’s introduction, with lights and
music, at the end of which he comes
warily to the podium, says, “Hello, ev-
eryone,” and sets up his laptop. Yahav
described watching Harari recently
freeze in front of an audience of thou-
sands in Beijing. “I was, ‘Start moving!’”
As an uncomfortable young profes-
sor, Harari tended to write out his world-
history lectures as a script. At one point,
as part of an effort to encourage his stu-
dents to listen to his words, rather than
transcribe them, he began handing out
copies of his notes. “They started circu-
lating, even among students who were
not in my class,” Harari recalled. “That’s
when I thought, Ah, maybe there’s a book
in it.” He imagined that a few students
at other universities would buy the book,
and perhaps “a couple of history buffs.”
This origin explains some of the qual-
ities that distinguish “Sapiens.” Unlike
many other nonfiction blockbusters, it
isn’t full of catchy neologisms or cine-
matic scene-setting; its impact derives
from a steady management of ideas, in
prose that has the unhedged authority—
and sometimes the inelegance—of a pro-
fessor who knows how to make one or
two things stick. (“An empire is a polit-
ical order with two important charac-
teristics ...”) “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
begins with a conversation between Jared
Diamond and a Papua New Guinean
politician; in “Sapiens,” Harari does not
figure in the narrative. He told me,
“Maybe it is some legacy of my study of
memoirs and autobiographies. I know
how dangerous it is to make personal
experience your main basis for authority.”It still astonishes Harari that read-
ers became so excited about the early
pages of “Sapiens,” which describe the
coexistence of various Homo species. “I
thought, This is so banal!” he told me.
“There is absolutely nothing there that
is new. I’m not an archeologist. I’m not
a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new
research.... It was really reading the
kind of common knowledge and just
presenting it in a new way.”
The Israeli edition, “A Brief History
of Humankind,” was published in June,- Yoram Yovell recalled that “Yuval
became beloved very quickly,” and was
soon a regular guest on Israeli television.
“It was beautiful to see the way he han-
dled it,” Yovell added. “He’s intellectu-
ally self-confident but truly modest.” The
book initially failed to attract foreign
publishers. Harari and Yahav marketed
a print-on-demand English-language
edition, on Amazon; this was Harari’s
own translation, and it included his Gmail
address on the title page, and illustra-
tions by Yahav. It sold fewer than two
thousand copies. In 2013, Yahav persuaded
Deborah Harris, an Israeli literary agent
whose clients include David Grossman
and Tom Segev, to take on the book. She
proposed edits and recommended hir-
ing a translator. Harris recently recalled
that, in the U.K., an auction of the re-
vised manuscript began with twenty-two
publishers, “and it went on and on and
on,” whereas, in the U.S., “I was getting
the most insulting rejections, of the kind
‘Who does this man think he is?’” Har-
vill Secker, Harari’s British publisher,
paid significantly more for the book than
HarperCollins did in the U.S.
Harari and Yahav recently visited Har-
ris at her house, in Jerusalem; it also serves
as her office. They had promised to cart
away copies of “Sapiens”—in French,
Portuguese, and Malay—that were filling
up her garden shed. At her dining table,
Harris recalled seeing “Sapiens” take off:
“The reviews were extraordinary. And
then Obama. And Gates.” (Gates, on his
blog: “I’ve always been a fan of writers
who try to connect the dots.”) Harris
began spotting the book in airports; “Sa-
piens,” she said, was reaching people who
read only one book a year.
There was a little carping from review-
ers—“Mr. Harari’s claim that Columbus
ignited the scientific revolution is surpris-
ing,” a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal