history
- Nov 1, 2019
There Never Was A West
- Nov 3, 2020
The Devil In The White City
- May 19, 2023
Dawn Of EverythingGraerber and Wengrow paint a compelling and beautiful painting of new potentials for understanding the past & present. They set up a neat dichotomy between a Rousseaun and Hobbesian view of the origins of humanity, before bravely pointing out that it was maybe a bit more complicated than all that. Some powerful ideas around political and social organizational structure experimentation, differing practices and paradigms, the impact of play and the view of humanity as effectively originating in play. They walk an interesting line between criticizing the anthropologists who revere and idolize the way of life outside the State, and at the same time offering optimistict and bordering-on utopian interpretations of the same - but, after all, they have a good story for all of it, and a smattering of impactful and transformative ideas to think on. An edifying read.
- Sep 18, 2023
How Europe Underdeveloped AfricaThe primary thrust of this book - using dialectical materialist/Marxist analysis to demonstrate the evils of Colonialism - seems kind of wild to me, from a historiographical standpoint. The only people who I can imagine these days denying the abstract notion of colonialism being bad are precisely those who would also deny out-of-hand any conclusions wrought from dialectical materialist analysis. Of course there is colonialism and colonialism, and while the explicit forays of the past are widely derided as probably-a-bad-idea, the colonialism (explicit or more socioeconomically implicit) of the present is less acknowledged - yet here, still, those Marxists I know are the first to call it out.
- Oct 17, 2023
The Wretched Of The EarthBrilliant! Thought-provoking and insightful into the forces and structures of decolonialization, and a bit challenging. The prefaces by Sartre and particularly Homi K Bhabha (sesquipedalian though it is) do an excellent job of contextualizing the rest. It is a bit fascinating that Sartre's preface, embracing (reveling in? maybe an ungenerous read of Sartre but it does feel like there is a bit of that) the necessity of violent revolution, criticized by Arendt for encouraging violence that dehumanizes, was removed at the bequest of Fanon's widow from certain editions following Sartre's support of Israel in the Six Day War.
- Oct 23, 2023
Pirate EnlightenmentThis book is a fascinating little history of Madagascar and the kingdoms and societies during the golden age of piracy. I (and I imagine I am not unique here) know little of this corner of the world and corner of history, and enjoyed learning about the unique cultural mixture driven by the intersection of Arabs, pirates, slavers, colonists, and Madagascar people. Graeber's writing is as always entertaining and educational, although there is not much here of his usual grand claims of historiographical reinterpretation and generalization - it is a more focused anthropology that I think likely has a less wide interest than the exciting title and Graeber's name might otherwise incur.
- Nov 9, 2023
China In Ten WordsI worry sometimes about my Education. I always thought it was like, pretty good, I got good grades in a wide variety of subjects, but then something like The Cultural Revolution comes to the fore and I am just astonishingly ignorant. A thing that something like a 10th of the current world population lived under, and I just have no idea what life was like, no anecdotes or stories, maybe I read a paragraph or two in high school and wrote a sentence answer on an exam some time.