Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has sold 35 million copies in 65 languages — an extraordinary achievement for a work of academic synthesis. Its central argument — that Homo sapiens dominates Earth because of our unique capacity for collective belief in shared "fictions" (money, nations, human rights, corporations) — is one of the most generative intellectual frameworks of the 21st century, reshaping how many readers think about history and society.