Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is not interested in assembling facts for the reader. Even if it were possible to extract facts from all of its loquacious paragraphs, one could not be sure that the author has not cherry-picked them to fit a polemical agenda. Page 9 of the Dawn of Everything says, "When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality." So this is a book with an agenda. It is a highly verbose polemic as opposed to a concise and dispassionate examination of the facts regarding the dawn of human culture. In my new book, How the Sumerians Became Rich, on page 197, I introduce anthropologist David S. Sandeford's 2018 complex network model of organizational complexity and demographic scale that predicts and explains both the qualitative shift from egalitarian to hierarchical social organization and the quantitative relationship between population and organizational complexity. You can read more about this model in the Wikipedia article on State Formation. But then, on page 198, I present David Wengrow's dissenting point of view from his 2015 Jack Goody lecture in which he describes how the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in Eastern Europe never transitioned from an egalitarian society to a ranked society, "because they saw no need for religious, military, or merchant ranks." The Dawn of Everything on page 297 concludes its discussion of this peace loving culture by saying simply, "around the middle of the fourth millennium BC, most of them were basically abandoned. We still don't know why." The Dawn of Everything does not provide the reader with the information that my book provides on page 199 -- "the kurgans that replaced the traditional horizontal graves in the area now contain human remains of a fairly diversified skeletal type approximately ten centimetres taller on average than the previous population." The Dawn of Everything has no mention of Sandeford nor does it provide all the information in a dispassionate way so that the reader has all of the facts. Graeber and Wengrow never discuss the consequences for egalitarianism of the late 4th millennium BC spread of horses and bronze sword technology from the Caucasus region. Although the Transcaucasian or Kura-Araxes culture was known for its metallurgy and bronze weapons, the one mention of this destructive and invasive culture (hidden in note 82 on page 578) focuses instead upon their pottery, stews, and casseroles. On page 138 of my book, I write, "Marcella Frangipane has been reporting on her excavations of late fourth millennium Arslantepe, where the monumental buildings were destroyed and new groups of people, probably nomadic pastoralists of Transcaucasian origin, settled down and built wattle and daub huts in the ruins." "All the cities and elites of Syria and Turkey that had been cooperating with Uruk, that displayed economic centralization both of labor and goods during the fourth millennium, are destroyed at this time." Graeber and Wengrow spin this situation by claiming on page 313 that 'heroic societies' moved in to occupy 'abandoned Uruk colonies'. The Dawn of Everything has older 2006 and 2012 references to Frangipane, not the newer 2016 and 2017 references that are in How The Sumerians Became Rich. On pages 12 and 88, my book describes how, starting with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, humans in the Ancient Near East began to distinguish between artificially created domestic spaces and wild outdoor spaces. "Using standard mudbricks, a typical Neolithic house took about 2 weeks to build, using a crew of 5 people or less, after dedicating 1 week to making and drying 500 to 750 bricks." We get an idea of how important the clean and artificial appearance of these human-created spaces were to their owners from the effort that they were willing to invest in coating them with lime or gypsum plaster. They were willing to heat limestone at 800-900ºC for 2-4 days in order to form quicklime, which could be mixed with water to create a white paste that was then applied to coat the walls and floors of their houses. Combined probably with increased personal hygiene, these village-dwelling, home-owning people were no longer wild and uncivilized. This is not discussed at all in The Dawn of Everything, apparently because there is a recent school of anthropology that dismisses the distinction between wild spaces and anthropic spaces, or even the idea of progress, as some kind of judgmental Western-oriented way of thinking. The subtitle of Graeber and Wengrow's 2nd chapter speaks of 'the myth of progress'. That means that it would be judgmental and wrong to claim that the accumulated civilization of the Sumerians was more advanced than that of an Amazonian Indian tribe. You could not, however, tell that to all the neighbors who surrounded Sumer and who sought to emulate their orderly and prosperous way of life. Ironically, Westerners entranced by the authors' dream of equality can learn from the experiences of a Marxist country that believed in 1945 that it could eliminate inequality. "The socialist model aspired to achieve an industrial progress free of the darker aspects of exploitation, inequality, and imperialism that marred western modernity." [Making China Modern, 2019, Muhlhahn, p. 375] "In the 1970s and 1980s, [however,] reform and opening set off profound changes in Chinese society. Poverty slowly disappeared from most regions, 400 million peasants saw their living standards improve markedly for the first time in decades....While the party securely held sway, egalitarianism and collectivism slowly unraveled and became concepts of the past." [ibid, pp. 513-514] By tracing the policy decisions and innovative steps by which China abandoned ideology in favor of economic progress, Muhlhahn's book parallels my own book on the Sumerians.