Summary of James Suzman's Work

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of James Suzman's Work in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: To answer these questions, James Suzman charts a grand history of "work" from the origins of life on Earth to our ever more automated present, challenging some of our deepest assumptions about who we are. Drawing insights from anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, zoology, physics, and economics, he shows that while we have evolved to find joy meaning and purpose in work, for most of human history our ancestors worked far less and thought very differently about work than we do now. He demonstrates how our contemporary culture of work has its roots in the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago. Our sense of what it is to be human was transformed by the transition from foraging to food production, and, later, our migration to cities. Since then, our relationships with one another and with our environments, and even our sense of the passage of time, have not been the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781952482823

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights on James Suzman's Work

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The majority of the congregation nodded their heads in agreement with the missionary’s opening statement that praised God for His work being finished on the seventh day.

#2

The Ju/’hoansi believed that when they were tempted to do something sinful, God punished them by taking away the only good thing in their lives - their land.

#3

The world as we know it is a result of humans trying to impose order and structure on it. This is evident in the Bible’s creation narrative, where God creates the world in six days, but leaves it in a state of chaos and ambiguity until the seventh day, when he creates humans and imbues them with social rules.

#4

The Coriolis effect is a theory that states that when something moves in a circular motion, its path will be deflected to the right. This explains why hurricanes and cyclones generally move to the right.

#5

Coriolis was a French engineer who applied mathematics to the study of billiards, and he developed the first known mathematical description of the transfer of energy from an object’s movement to its momentum. He also coined the term work to describe this energy transfer.

#6

Life actively works to survive, grow, and reproduce. It does so despite the second law of thermodynamics which states that all energy will eventually be distributed evenly throughout the universe.

#7

Entropy is the measure of the number of ways that a system can be arranged. In other words, it reflects the lack of organization within a system.

#8

The 19th century German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann believed that life was just another, albeit complex, branch of physics and chemistry. He believed that all living things were engines that required fuel in the form of food, air, and water to operate.

#9

Life as we know it requires energy to sustain itself, and the process of life forming from inorganic matter requires work.

#10

The first living organisms on Earth were almost certainly bacteria-like single-cellular organisms. They used geothermal energy to power their growth and, later, photosynthesis to