Description
he review aggregator website Book Marks reported that 44% of critics gave the book a “rave” review, whilst 11% of the critics “panned” the book. The rest of the critics expressed either “positive” (22%) or “mixed” (22%) impressions, based on a sample of nine reviews.[4] The book had articles and reviews published by The New York Times, The Economist,[5] Financial Times, The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Times.
In The New York Times, Bill Gates calls the book “fascinating” and his author “such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking.” For Gates, Harari “has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century.”[6]
John Thornhill in Financial Times said that “[a]lthough 21 Lessons is lit up by flashes of intellectual adventure and literary verve, it is probably the least illuminating of the three books” written by Harari, and that many of the observations in it feel recycled from the two others.[7] Helen Lewis review in The Guardian is not as glowing but admires “the ambition and breadth of his work, smashing together unexpected ideas into dazzling observations.”[3]
The book has also received negative reviews. Gavin Jacobson in the New Statesman sees it as “a study thick with promise and thin in import” with advice “either too vague or too hollow to provide any meaningful guidance.”[8] In The Times, Gerard DeGroot writes: “The author of Sapiens is good at identifying the crises to come but his syrupy platitudes are no answer.”[9]
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