What’s information? Yuval Noah Harari gives answer in new book
Israeli author brings historical context to the modern age of information overload in book set to hit shelves in September
NEW YORK (AP) — Million-selling author Yuval Noah Harari has another grand theme for his next book: Information.
Harari’s “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” will be published September 10 by Penguin Random House. Harari is known for such broad and accessible historical works as “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus.”
“We’re living through the most profound information revolution in human history, but we can’t understand it unless we understand what has come before,” Harari said in a statement Tuesday.
“‘Nexus’ doesn’t argue that understanding the past enables us to predict the future. My goal is to show that by making informed choices, we can still prevent the worst outcomes. Because if we can’t change the future, then why waste time discussing it?”
Harari’s books have sold more than 45 million copies worldwide and have been translated into dozens of languages, according to Penguin Random House.
The publisher is calling the book “a revelatory framework with which to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power.”
My new book 'NEXUS' will be published this September. It considers how information networks have made and unmade our world – from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, Stalinism, Nazism, to the current resurgence of populism and the urgent choices we face as… pic.twitter.com/zDydqbHM0N
— Yuval Noah Harari (@harari_yuval) January 23, 2024
In a statement Tuesday, Penguin Random House Global CEO Nihar Malaviya called the new book “a brilliant historical framework to understand this moment and, crucially, to think about what we might do, before it’s too late.”
The Times of Israel Community.