Vladimir Rumyantsev- Hickey: Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, first published in 2011 in Hebrew, and in 2014 in English, is justifiably one of the most celebrated books of our time. With it's audacious subtitle, the book attempts to explain and explore why our particular species has thrived while most others have perished, and how we are set apart from all others due to our ability and desire to understand and give meaning to things that do not necessarily exist - such as the shared myths of language, money, religion, love, political boundaries and a host of things not truly tangible but with which we have developed a shared understanding.             Almost immediately after I began the book I would start to sketch out some ideas for an extensive piece of music, some dealing with it's broadest concepts. This proved to be ineffective, but the idea for a piece stayed with me for a year, eventually taking shape, like many of my works, only during it's composition. In no way have I tried to create a chapter by chapter