RaveJacobinWhat makes David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything an instant classic is its comprehensive scientific demolition of this myth—what they call \'the Myth of the Stupid Savage\' ... The book draws much of its value from its eclectic approach ... a sweeping tour into the past that hops from continent to continent, and from one social sphere to another to tell stories that, depending on the reader’s familiarity with the archaeological record, might come as revelations ... The key upshot is that this newfound view of our past equips us with an expanded sense of possibilities as to what we might do with ourselves in the future. Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages ... So much of what makes this book fascinating is the alien nature of the phenomena we encounter within, at least to contemporary eyes ... The Dawn of Everything reads like a work of sci-fi, except that what turns out to be fictional is our received view of human history. The writing is often funny, sometimes hilarious. At the same time, because hardly a paragraph goes by without bequeathing insight, this is a book that requires to be patiently taken in. It sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading.
