Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, is a book about the history of mankind. It was written in 2014 and has generally aged well so far. In fact, one aspect is that one of the points Harari makes, that being that 2014 was during a golden age for liberal values, was inadvertently underscored by events around the world, particularly the 2016 US presidential election results. One of Harari's conclusions is that humans now are on the verge of evolving to the next level whether through biology, cyborgs or AI (see my review of Superintelligence by Bostrom) and that as a result the end is near for Homo Sapiens as a species.
However, it has been a spectacular existence in that in only 10 millennia, we have gone from tentative farmers with the first agricultural settlements to filling the Earth and becoming the clearly dominant species on the planet. Harari does a cooks tour of history, philosophy, economics and theology during his exposition of the breadth of human history. Although he admits that developments are not assured (we could still blow up the planet) and it might take some time (even a couple of centuries), but nonetheless, on the geological time scale, the whole of civilization since the start of writing things down has really only happened in the blink of an eye.
I highly recommend the book. Although there will be some sections which may for any given reader feel pedantic, overall, this was a tour de force, weaving together many threads from different disciplines that I found compelling overall.
