{"id":11040,"date":"2017-05-31T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2017-05-31T04:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/?p=11040"},"modified":"2018-09-19T22:49:57","modified_gmt":"2018-09-19T14:49:57","slug":"teacher-diaries-ms-xaviera-non-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/2017\/05\/teacher-diaries-ms-xaviera-non-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Teacher Diaries: Ms. Nordstrom &#8211; Non-Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another&#8230; In fact, the people who knew the period best \u2013 those alive at the time \u2013 were the most clueless of all.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Non-fiction has never been a greatly attractive genre to me \u2013 I love fiction for its escapism and precisely because it is imagined and psychological. Whenever I do stretch tentatively for a non-fiction book, it is with slight skepticism and caution.<\/p>\n<p>What this means though, is that the few non-fiction books that I end up liking, I end up loving.<\/p>\n<p>Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, written by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, is one of the non-fiction books that falls under this category.<\/p>\n<p>The book begins 70,000 years ago and works its way through human evolutionary, social, and technological developments. It takes the reader through surprisingly detailed accounts of the centuries and their intellectual movements all the way up to the present day. At each turn Harari overlaps biological discussion with historical and philosophical discourse.<\/p>\n<p>His writing is lucid and compelling and somehow keeps your attention even though facts are coming at you from all angles.<\/p>\n<p>The book isn\u2019t without its faults &#8211; can you really lay out the history of humankind in about 400 pages?<br \/>\nMaybe not quite. Would I have loved it more had it only been 200 pages and less polemical in places?<br \/>\nDefinitely.<\/p>\n<p>But when you get into it at its best, these objections become less important.<br \/>\nI love this book for Harari\u2019 description of the development of language, the underlying question about human happiness, about fear of death, about culture constructs and biology.<\/p>\n<p>This is a book for anyone interested in how historical perspective can inform contemporary issues. It reads like a series of reflections and debates on the human condition.<\/p>\n<p>Sapiens is without doubt a worthwhile, thought-provoking read \u2013 less about \u2018how\u2019 we are as a species than \u2018who\u2019 we are.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_10879\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-10879\" style=\"width: 335px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10879 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Sapiens.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"335\" height=\"499\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-10879\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind<\/em>, Yuval Noah Harari<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another&#8230; In fact, the people who knew the period best \u2013 those alive at the time \u2013 were the most clueless of all.\u201d Non-fiction has never been a greatly attractive genre to me \u2013 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":10879,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[713],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11040"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11040"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12337,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11040\/revisions\/12337"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.i-learner.edu.hk\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}