Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Why did I pick this?
Highly recommended by most of the people who I get my book recommendations from. I'm also interested in Mental Models and recently came across an interesting way of deducing Mental Models by Peter Kaufman, called the three-buckets method. Here you take the three largest sample sized there exist; the organic universe, the biological universe and recorded human history.
Sapiens tells the history of human kind, so I thought it would be a good fit for bucket number three.

The book
The book is divided into four parts; the cognitive revolution (separating Homo Sapiens from other ‘human' species), the agricultural revolution, the unification of humankind (going from very separate societies to a world-spanning species) and the scientific revolution.
In each part Harari describes the factors contributing to the revolution, for example, he argues that money, imperialism and global religions played major factors in the unification of humankind.

My thoughts
Loved the read. Harari has a great way of explaining concepts in layman's terms, making the rather dry subject of Human History very accessible.
This is even more so due to his novel ways of describing certain concepts. This is already the case in the opening pages (from memory); “At first there was the inorganic universe, and we call the field that researches this Physics. Chemical reactions started to take place and we call this field Science. Etc”
I had the feeling that Harari skipped over some statements quite quickly and would need more argumentation. Or state that it was personal opinion.

Recommendations
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the overall history of humankind and especially those who want a general overview (rather than specific events).
As I mentioned in my intro it's also interesting for people looking for Mental Models, although from what I've heard maybe his second book is more interesting (called Homo Deus).

Another book on my want-to-read list that I think would nicely complement this book is The New Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan, which describes the way the Silk Road and global trade has influenced the unification of mankind.