Tahir

Before reading i expected different shallow stories of humans being compassionate and friendly throughout history, kind of a one sided story telling of human kindness. I also expected it to not be very self-critical.

After reading it i can confidently say that it exceeded my expectations; The stories are well thought out and he has done remarkable research on all the stories he is telling.

On the other hand there were big issues i found whole reading.

Bregman tries hard to back up his arguments and often constructs a story of Two factions fighting about humans being compassionate or narcissistic. There, i find, it slightly falls apart, since almost every story has the same structure:

1. introduce a person that says the opposite of what he wants to say
2. Introduce a person who says the opposite
3. Find a story that matches the second guys thesis
4. Conclude that the second person is mostly right (with backup from science)

My second gripe is that he paints a very bleak picture of most people’s worldview at the start, which I simply can’t relate to. It’s just overly exaggerated. The problem is that the subsequent arguments build on this, making the argumentation hard to swallow.

While i have major concerns with this book, i think the stories themselves have been written up beautifully and they were a joy to read.

The characters are very unlikeable and the setting, though potentially interesting, is boringly described. There’s also a heavy info dump at the beginning. The only positives are the pleasant writing style and the creative story.

Tuff