Absorbing, entertaining... provocative but compelling... eminently accessible and enjoyable. A real gas - in short!

Funny, clever and altogether effervescent... Kean writes superbly about science itself... A joy for any reader

There is no denying the pleasure and indeed the wealth of scientific information to be obtained from reading Caesar’s Last Breath. It will change forever the way I think about breathing.

Kean is the teacher you wish you'd had: genial, companionable and infectiously enthusiastic. This is an entertaining and accessible guide to the mysterious vapour of gases. Popular science at its best.

It’s a helluva read. And it’s a gas.

An altogether excellent read, an invigorating and stylish mixture of chemistry, history and reportage that brings to light many of the untold stories of the air that surrounds and sustains us

This vibrant, fact-filled science book makes the chemistry of air riveting

Told with Kean’s trademark combination of goofy wisecracking and an exceptional knack for communicating the principles of science

Fascinating stories, so insightful, informative, and disarmingly written. It gave this astronaut a new respect for the air around us all, and made me delightfully more aware of each breath I take.

Brims with such fascinating tales of chemical history that it'll change the very way you think about breathing.... Kean crams the book full of wild yarns told with humorously dramatic flair.... The effect is oddly intimate, the way all good storytelling is -- you feel like you're sharing moments of geeky amusement with a particularly hip chemistry teacher

The most fun to be had from nonfiction is a good science book, with a writer of craft who can capture both the excitement and the elegance of science, the incredible fact that this is really how it works. Sam Kean is such a writer and Caesar's Last Breath is such a book. An enormous pleasure to read.

Sam Kean has done it again - this time clearly and entertainingly explaining the science of the air around us. He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for finding the magic hidden in the everyday.

Harrowing and enlightening... This is a story of darkness and light, horror and hope. It's not an easy read, but it is a fascinating one, and highly recommended.

Had me hooked right from the start. Incredible story, and even more incredible story-telling... has had an unexpected impact on me and will change the way I practice medicine from here on.

A compassionate and critical look at medicine and illness from both a doctor’s and a patient’s perspective... Awdish has written a unique and insightful memoir.

Devastatingly perceptive.

This book contains some exquisite writing about nature, but it is always powerfully and insistently ground in “its cause” … A radical polemic in the tradition of Hazlitt and Cobbett

This is a clarion call to the country’

A new book by Mark Cocker is a major event and his latest is a work of sweeping ambition

Important… ambitious… [Cocker] is a superb writer

A compelling history of nature conservation and why it matters, it is worth your time

Our Place… is a work of serious and sustained advocacy – passionate and committed… elements are fused in the writing, along with many apparent digressions and asides, in a way that gives the book a richly textured feel… the argument advances on several fronts simultaneously and in more than one dimension, in a complex literary ecology matching his subject.

Mark Cocker… writes with superb understanding

A lyrical and intensely personal account… an excellent and important book… a wake-up call to us all.

Its breadth is startling... It changes the way you look at the world and few books tick that box.

Probably the most ambitious history book of the year. Certainly the most thought-provoking

As a writer, Harari is superbly clear. He’s also a formidable polymath and a wonderfully elegant thinker... He is a brilliant analyst with a storyteller’s gift

I have just read Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens. It is brilliant. Most likely the best - and I have read very many - on the history of humankind. I have never read anything better

We usually think that we are an outcome of our personal history, where we grew up, the way our parents educated us, etc. In Sapiens, Harari delves deep into our history as a species to help us understand who we are and what made us this way. An engrossing read.

Eloquent and wonderfully funny

This is mega-history of the best sort: sweeping but not simplistic, contemporary but not gimmicky, provocative but not contrarian. Almost everyone will want to argue with one part of this book or another, but working out which part and why will do us all good.

For its sheer originality and intellectual stimulation, I was captivated by Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens

That fellow connected an awful lot of dots in that work. I thought the book would be a dense read, a slog, with a struggle for my brain on every page. I had a highlighter ready to mark the more pavement-thick paragraphs I’d have to go back and re-ponder. Instead, I flew through it like it was a nonfiction The Thorn Birds. Does that mean I’m getting smarter?

Ambitious and invigorating

Harari’s book is important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens

Brilliantly done and endlessly fascinating

Vast and intricate... Engaging and informative

A thrilling account of humankind’s extraordinary history

The book is maddeningly opinionated and insanely ambitious. It is also compulsively readable and impossibly learned. It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species

An enthusiastic and confident narrative that is relentlessly interesting from the first word to the last

The most exciting book I’ve read this year

One of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year... Harari is one of the very few thinkers around who’s really looking at what’s happening now. Sapiens is his attempt to tell the story of the past to understand the present: the great technological advances that we are all living through now

Eloquent and provocative

A headclutchingly provocative account of our species from the Stone Age to the present... Stunningly ambitious and compellingly written. They call it macro-history. They’re right.

Fascinating

Unforgettably vivid language. I urge everyone to read it

Contains a remarkable piece of information on almost every page and reminds us that we should be grateful to be human.

Thought-provoking

I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species.

Read with an open mind and you might look at life in a whole new way.

A fantastic book about how homo sapiens came to conquer the world

A dark and thrilling epic.

I have continued to be driven bonkers by my current obsession: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, an extraordinary tome that charts the plight of the planet’s most destructive species since the dawn of time: us. Every paragraph gives you pause for thought, as it catalogues how nuts human beings really are… It may be the best book I’ve ever read; it’s certainly fascinating.

This doesn’t make you feel clever; it makes you feel included. It’s written so brilliantly… He’s written about the human family as a family.

It's one of the best books I’ve read recently and gives an excellent overview of how our species has developed and helps us understand why and who we are today.

A sweeping account of the history of our species, written in vivid prose.

It rattles along, firing glitter-coated bullets of wisdom as it goes. If Carlsberg made professors, they’d have fashioned them thus. You’ll never have quite as much fun while learning so much.

Reading this wonderful book feels like looking at life down the bigger end of the telescope. Its scope – which incorporates the history of our species and the question of what the future may have in store – is so magisterial, one has an increasingly godlike feeling while reading it.

An absolute trove that everyone who wants to understand everything from human evolution to diet, religions and limited liability companies should read.

Opening up a controversial topic with spirit and thoroughness, Sapiens will challenge your preconceptions, provoke discussion and, most importantly, push you to think for yourself… Bold and provocative.

A brilliant, interdisciplinary account of the past and future of our species… Some of Harari’s most interesting points are the ways in which the fundamental, unchanging traits that make us human (emotions, desires) relate to the modern world. Essential reading for any liberal arts degree.

In the unlikely event you haven’t already read it and…fancy learning some cool new stuff in a fun way, I wholeheartedly recommend it to you.

It’s so intense that you have to read a bit then have a rest. It has brilliant passages, such as where he argues humans became enslaved by agriculture. Vivid and invigorating.

Every now and then a book comes along that tilts your perspective on the world. This internationally best-selling phenomenon is one of them.