Best Seller List Sees Double
In a rare feat, historian Yuval Noah Harari’s name appears twice on the latest NYT Nonfiction Hardcover Best Seller list.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (HC/Harper; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) debuts at #3.
The book explores how the development of artificial life and intelligence affects real human beings. It has received widespread attention from the media. The author is interviewed by The Atlantic, Time, and Wired. NPR calls the book “enlightening and slightly terrifying.” The Guardian says it is “spellbinding” and says, “it is hard to imagine anyone could read this book without getting an occasional, vertiginous thrill.”
The NYT reviewer, however, is lukewarm, writing “an argument can look seamless and still contain lots of dropped stitches.”
It is joined on the best seller list by Harari’s previous title, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample, 2015), returning at #10 on the strength of the attention to the new title.
A hit when it first came out, it received a second wind from Bill Gates who picked it as one of his Summer Reads.
Below are NPR’s interviews with the author for each book: