Humans: A Brief History Of How We F*cked It All Up~ Tom Phillips

I don’t normally read non-fiction books but this caught my attention as something that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up is exactly what it says on the front cover. There are ten chapters of ten different genres of f*ck ups from war to environmental messes.

I started off this book with good intentions and actually really enjoyed the first couple of chapters. The Prologue titled The Dawn of F*ck-Ups tells the story of Lucy the ape who fell out of the tree and helped scientists to figure out evolution. That’s the sort of thing that really interests me as a bit of a science geek (who understands a lot less than I want to). The chapters about science f*ck ups really interested me and I found myself getting really interested in the combustible rivers and the lead poisoning from petrol.

The chapters about politics and war were a struggle for me to get through. These chapters made my motivation drain away and it took me ages to process the information that I was reading. The worst part is, I wanted to be interested in what was written, but couldn’t find that interest anywhere.

Despite my lack of interest in the subject of some of the chapters, I did enjoy the little lists at the ends of the chapters giving a few more examples of how humans f*cked up. These were only a couple sentences, a paragraph at most, but they were the highlight of some of the chapters for me.

Overall, I was quite neutral on the book. There were some parts I really enjoyed and others that I really didn’t care about. The humour was there, but I found some of it to be lost under the weight of information. I give Humans: A Brief History Of How We F*cked It All Up a very neutral three out of five stars.

C

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