... a fascinating, radical, and playful entry into a seemingly exhaustively well-trodden genre, the grand evolutionary history of humanity.

... a profuse and antic account of how we came to take that old narrative for granted and why we might be better off if we let it go.

... what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims.

... a work of dizzying ambition, one that seeks to rescue stateless societies from the condescension with which they’re usually treated. Yet it succeeds better in uprooting conventional wisdom than in laying down a narrative of its own. The result is a book that is both thrilling and exasperating, showcasing the promise and the perils of the anarchist approach to history.

What 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'.

Though combative, The Dawn of Everything is an upbeat book. Its debunking energies mainly go to refuting the conventional wisdom at its most discouraging.

... fascinating.

... a glorious mess of a book that nonetheless upends platitudes about early human communities and power disparities that have persisted through the ages. While Graeber and Wengrow challenge our parochial views of prehistory, their true target is history of a modern, Eurocentric flavor. The book posits a sweeping new paradigm as the authors pore over a massive body of anthropological and archaeological data.

The problem with the Graeber/Wengrow thesis is that the assumption that things were better then than they are now is as much a statement of faith as the conventional view. The authors are right to question the prevailing mythology in the light of new evidence, but are they right to think that the human condition in which we are, as they keep insisting, 'stuck'—with our banks, wars and political squabbles—is inferior to anything that has gone before? Is it not more likely that all humans are stuck in the condition of being too self-aware to find peace?.

The Dawn of Everything, chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read. Graeber, who did his fieldwork in Madagascar, was well known for his caustic wit and energetic prose, and Wengrow, too, has established himself not only as an accomplished archaeologist working in the Middle East but as a gifted and lively writer. A volume of macrohistory—even of anti-macrohistory—needs to land its points with some regularity, and Graeber and Wengrow aren’t averse to repeating themselves. But for the most part they convey a sense of stakes and even suspense. This is prose it’s easy to surrender to.

... richly provocative.

... the irony of Graeber and Wengrow’s 'new history' becomes evident. Though the authors argue convincingly that Rousseau’s sequential account of early societies is mistaken, they retain—and even accentuate—his story of civilisation as a fall from a condition of primordial grace. Having rejected Rousseau’s account, they need an explanation of their own for what they regard as humanity’s descent into servility, but it never appears. A few pages before the end of this bold and thought-stirring book, they are still asking.

Unwieldy.

A welcome corrective to a field that has been dominated by a certain kind of teleological, and fundamentally conservative, story about human history.

... ingenious.

Vast in scope and dazzling in erudite detail, the book seethes with intriguing ideas; unfortunately, though, the authors’ habitual overgeneralizations...undermine confidence in their method of grand speculation from tenuous evidence.