The breadth and scope of this book is impressive but I don't think it quite hits the mark for me.

I found the beginning really interesting - unsurprisingly, as it's an area of history that I'm not familiar with.

And then it lost its way for me, churning out the same worn ground of human history throughout the early modern to recent modern history. It didn't offer anything groundbreaking or novel in its analysis and it's a hefty piece of literature to get through just to demonstrate where Sapiens are going next.

I get that it's a popular read - it's aimed at a wide audience and many won't have the historical knowledge that I have, but it didn't feel well researched, it was full of subjective opinion and moral assumptions throughout and missed the nuance that is inevitably lost in a work of this scale.

He wrapped it all up in a nice bow at the end, and the last section started to peak my interest - in his discussion of where we are all going and what is next for the human race. But even this didn't feel novel for me - it didn't make me aware of anything I didn't already know.

The most interesting part for me - and it tells that the author is interested in human happiness - is his section on happiness. What makes us happy. Here, it felt slightly more considered, more nuanced, less sure of itself.

Perhaps I am expecting too much. It's a decent launchpad for figuring out what you might be interested in learning about in more detail. But it lacked focus for me. It's very nicely structured but without his afterword at the end, wrapping it all up and summarising it all, I was left with the overall feeling of... 'yeah? And?'