What book or piece of literature you believe is important for the entire Colgate Class to read? Why?

Supplement essay for Colgate University

Colgate's core curriculum teaches students empathy, informed debate, and critical thinking. Please tell us what book or piece of literature you believe is important for the entire Colgate Class of 2023 to read. Why?

This is a supplement essay question of Colgate University. The maximum words are 250. Could someone please help me review my essay and also help me sort out a few words. My essay is 261 words.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

This book tells the story of our species, how Homo Sapiens came to rule the world. The author combines two and a half million years of evolution and dwells into the intricate fabric of human society, norms, and values.

The main idea Harari places forward is what makes our species different. By using religion and our economy as an example, Harari points the difference to be that Sapiens are myth-makers; they use imagination and language to communicate ideas and alternatives. The importance of shared myths is that it allowed Sapiens to cooperate, organize at scale, and dominate the world.

Agricultural revolution pushed our species on the forefront of the food chain and scientific revolution helped in making us a super species-a species capable of destroying Earth. We made our culture and social boundaries by assigning somethings to be right while others to be wrong. The reason I think his book should be included in the class of 2023 is because this 400-page book, in its basic form, boils down to a simple yet profound question:

What is it that makes us humans?

Is it the culture, the weapons, the myths, the religion that makes us humans?
Should we continue to exploit other species and the environment for our own benefit? Does ethics only apply when dealing with us, the Homo Sapiens? It sparks the discussion in everything we stand for as a species. The book is filled with our own history, making us think about Harari's each and every claim critically.

This book draws a compelling narrative about how Homo Sapiens came to rule the world by combining two and a half million years of evolution and dwelling into the intricate fabric of societal norms and values.


remove this line


Will continued exploitation of others yield favorable benefits?

I guess this should take care of the word limit

Anupam, if you reverse the presentation of the paragraphs, you will be able to reduce the word count without having to change the way you wrote the essay for the most part. By presenting the questions you hope to have the class of 2023 debate upon, then presenting the title of the book and what the topic of the book is about, then simply saying that the book opens the debate to the questions you posed because of specific reasons, the word count goes down and the interest in the book will peak. You can opt to lose the full second paragraph since you rearranged the presentation of the question and the coverage of the book. The second paragraph loses importance in the presentation so you can safely remove it. Compress the meaning of that paragraph into the summary of the book instead. That should work just fine.