David Graeber (Author)
David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School
of Economics. He is the author of, among others, The Dawn of
Everything- A New History of Humanity, Debt- The First 5,000 Years,
Bullshit Jobs- A Theory, and Pirate Enlightenment, and was a
contributor to Harper's Magazine, the Guardian, and the Baffler. An
iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to
make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2
September 2020.
David Wengrow (Author)
David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a
visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of
three books, including What Makes Civilization?. Wengrow conducts
archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle
East.
A boldly ambitious work ... entertaining and thought-provoking ...
an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us
reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see
present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and
elusive nature.
*Observer*
What a gift ... Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past
30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we're
used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising,
paradoxical, inspiring.
*The Atlantic*
Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read ... As we seek
new, sustainable ways to organise our world, we need to understand
the full range of ways our ancestors thought and lived. And we must
certainly question conventional versions of our history which we
have accepted, unexamined, for far too long.
*The Guardian*
Pacey and potentially revolutionary ... This is more than an
argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the
present.
*Sunday Times*
A fascinating, radical, and playful entry into a seemingly
exhaustively well-trodden genre, the grand evolutionary history of
humanity. It seeks nothing less than to completely upend the terms
on which the Standard Narrative rests ... erudite, compelling,
generative, and frequently remarkably funny ... once you start
thinking like Graeber and Wengrow, it's difficult to stop.
*Boston Review*
A spectacular, flashy and ground-breaking retelling of human
history, blazing with iconoclastic rebuttals to conventional
wisdom. Full of fresh thinking, it's a pleasure to read and offers
a bracing challenge on every page.
*BBC History*
A timely, intriguing, original and provocative take on the most
recent thirty thousand years of human history ... consistently
thought-provoking ... In forcing us to re-examine some of the cosy
assumptions about our deep past, Graeber and Wengrow remind us very
clearly of the perils of holding ourselves captive to a
deterministic vision of human history as we try to shape our
future.
*Literary Review*
An engrossing series of insights ... They re-inject humanity into
our distant forebears, suggesting that our prevailing story about
human history - that not much innovation occurred in human
societies until the invention of agriculture - is utterly
wrong.
*Observer*
Fascinating, thought-provoking, groundbreaking. A book that will
generate debate for years to come.
*Rutger Bregman*
The Dawn of Everything is also the radical revision of everything,
liberating us from the familiar stories about humanity's past that
are too often deployed to impose limitations on how we imagine
humanity's future. Instead they tell us that what human beings are
most of all is creative, from the beginning, so that there is no
one way we were or should or could be. Another of the powerful
currents running through this book is a reclaiming of Indigenous
perspectives as a colossal influence on European thought, a
valuable contribution to decolonizing global histories.
*Rebecca Solnit*
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