📚 bookblog: The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World... (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:29:15 -0400

Rereading The Dawn of Everything finally pushed me to use an on-hand Libro.fm credit to get this in audiobook so I could give it a try. I find Graeber to be a bit uneven (I appreciate most of what he writes, but I don’t find all of his arguments totally convincing), and so I waffled on whether to give this full marks.

Ultimately, I went with the more generous rating, because even if some of his ideas didn’t land with me, it’s useful to have so much of his thinking captured in one place. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll need to get a print copy of this for the same research project that Dawn of Everything had me thinking about.

Of course, a lot of the essays here were good in their own right. There Never Was a West is helpful for fleshing out his idea of the indigenous critique, I find that Bullshit Jobs is stronger as an essay than it was a whole book, and the final essay on fun and play was very helpful for teasing out some of the anarchist-flavored similarities I find between his writing and that of Jacques Ellul.

📚 bookblog: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:00:59 -0400

I wasn’t expecting to count this as a “work read” when I decided to reread it a couple of months ago, but wow, did it ever help make sense of some ideas I’m kicking around for a potential book project.

Like my last read, I have to admit that I’m ill-suited to evaluate the historical or anthropological claims. I really appreciate the framework it brings to its inquiry, though, not least for the way it echoes similar ideas in Jacques Ellul’s work. This gets me thinking about anarchist commonalities between these authors, which is something I want to explore more.

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📚 bookblog: The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World... (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

📚 bookblog: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)