jjupille's reviews
470 reviews

 

Graeber and Wengrow's _The Dawn of Everything_ got lots of play in various high-falutin' review venues late last year, and being a sucker for big history I checked it out. I have to say it was pretty amazing, though I think they lay out far more threads than they can manage to weave together. The key takeways for me, off the top of my head, are the following: 1) agriculture is not an absorbing state, where once you discover it, you get stuck with it; 2) having agriculture does not condemn you to social inequality and a coercive state; 3) not unrelated, the deep historical record shows lots more variability, lots less linearity, and TONS more creative agency in shaping how we live than the conventional narrative allows for.

I found the "indigenous critique" fascinating and it really made me think. Schismogenesis seems likely and I accept what they have to say about it. The whole thread of how "caring work" translated into the bigger picture kind of lost me. I leave the book still somewhat uncertain as to how we landed on a world of social inequality and coercive states, given that none of it was inevitable. There are probably lots of other things I might want to say, but feel free to weigh in. If you liked Diamond's _Guns, Germs and Steel_, Harari's _Sapiens_, or Scott's work on "grain states", I do highly recommend this. 

Delightful

Kinda lame

Great read. I was amazed at how light and airy the prose was, given how dark the subject matter is. A pretty fantastic contrast there. 

I loved it!

I liked this a lot. There's a lot going on, and I would have liked some more distillation (like a causal diagram), but it's smart and quite persuasive.

London is no great prose stylist. I have him in my head next to Steinbeck, because of geographical, historical, and political proximity, but their writing occupies separate universes. The windup was too long. Ernest Everhard was a cardboard cutout of lefty manliness, a rather self-congratulatory "idealized self" of London. Avis was  not a cardboard cutout because she had ideas of her own, was just a little bit bohemian, was ready to fight to the death, but she was pretty thinly characterized, and mostly lacked big-picture agency. She followed the man over whom she swooned rather dissatisfyingly. She is no feminist hero. And that's fine, but it's the flatness of the characters, partly driven by the flatness of the prose in the early going, that I found limiting.

The prose got better as there was more action.

The sociology was a little didactic whenever Ernest was delivering his lessons on socialism, certainly too pat and smugly self-assured in the way that committed Marxists have been for 150 years. Some of the social categories, such as labor castes, and certainly the people of the abyss, didn't seem quite so textbook, though I am no expert in that stuff.

The book (published 1907) is credited with being wildly prescient, e.g., with respect to the rise of fascism, but I don't see it that way. Its materialism is just too strong, and pretty much leaves out all cultural and other immaterial social factors. Its determinism also leads it astray, as history is quite a bit less linear than a simple Marxist teleology --which is what is on offer here-- can handle.

So, anyway, I am glad I read it, and it's holds a good bit of interest, but it's pretty limited.

I liked it. I especially liked the ending. "The world ain't straight," indeed.

It actually took me much longer to get (slog?) through this than I thought. Reiser writes very entertainingly, but, in a challenge I myself will be confronting too soon, he has so much information and knows his topic so well, it just ends up really dense. Again, I think he wrote well at the micro level of prose, and at the broader level of narrative, with characters, plot lines, etc. It's just ... a lot. Certainly, given my own interests and expertise, a big theme involves bureaucratic pathology, especially in the high modern era of technical and administrative hubris, a belief in neverending progress, and the basic problems of "Seeing Like A State", where Leviathan doesn't see, hear, smell or feel beautiful flowing water and all the live it brings, all of the amazing geology it produces, etc., etc., but a tableau to be made legible, brought under control, made "useful".

Yeesh. Terrible. And what a pickle it has gotten us into, not least in the face of accelerating climate change! We no longer face drought, some hydrologist was just quoted in the NYT or somewhere, we are dealing with aridification.

Ther is some good news. Some dams are coming down. Native Americans' rights seem to be factoring in more heavily than they ever have. Urban water usage is becoming more and more efficient.

The big problem, of course, remains ag. And that has to do with how we eat and, because money flows from that, and because this is America, where we live by the Golden Rule ("those who have the gold make the rules"), xeriscaping our yards will save a proverbial drop in the bucket. We need to stop eating meat (I have not yet) and start factoring water into our eating decisions to a far greater degree (not just energy consumption, pollution, etc.) than we currently are.

Fascinating stuff, not going to get any easier! Well worth reading and having on your shelf if you live west of the hundredth meridian and/or care about the long run future of our civilization.