MixedThe Financial Times...with Against the Grain, the Yale political scientist turns his ever-expanding gaze to the distant past in search of some explicit answers ... Productively driven by the curiosity of a self-declared outsider, Scott has a sure eye for the most important debates as he probes the origins of civilisation ... Written with great enthusiasm and characteristic flair, Scott’s account is at once compelling, idiosyncratic and more than a little uneven ... His repetitive claim to be rescuing his audience from some tellingly unreferenced straw-man \'standard version\' of social evolution that indiscriminately meshes together farming, sedentism, urbanisation, irrigation and state formation cannot bear much weight ... Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilisation and political order.
