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The Dawn of Everything
- A New History of Humanity
- Narrated by: Malk Williams
- Length: 24 hrs and 2 mins
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Debt - Updated and Expanded
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- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
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Interesting but heavy
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Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. It went viral. After a million online views in 17 different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
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Enjoyed
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The Silk Roads
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It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures, and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the 20th century - this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East.
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Epic Telling of History
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Origin
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Origin is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. Origin provides an overview of these new histories throughout North and South America, and a glimpse into how the tools of genetics reveal details about human history and evolution.
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Excellent book full of science and history
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Drought-hit regions bleeding those who for whom a rural life has become untenable. Coastlines diminishing year on year. Wildfires and hurricanes leaving widening swaths of destruction. The culprit, most of us accept, is climate change, but not enough of us are confronting one of its biggest, and most present, consequences: a total reshaping of the earth’s human geography. As Gaia Vince points out early in Nomad Century, global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literal billions displaced in the coming decades.
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Essential and urgent
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Debt - Updated and Expanded
- The First 5,000 Years
- Written by: David Graeber
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
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Interesting but heavy
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Written by: David Graeber
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Bullshit Jobs
- A Theory
- Written by: David Graeber
- Narrated by: Christopher Ragland
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. It went viral. After a million online views in 17 different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
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Enjoyed
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The Democracy Project
- A History, a Crisis, a Movement
- Written by: David Graeber
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
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Overall
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Democracy has been the American religion since before the Revolution - from New England town halls to the multicultural democracy of Atlantic pirate ships. But can our current political system, one that seems responsive only to the wealthiest among us and leaves most Americans feeling disengaged, voiceless, and disenfranchised, really be called democratic? And if the tools of our democracy are not working to solve the rising crises we face, how can we - average citizens - make change happen? David Graeber, one of the most influential scholars and activists of his generation, takes listeners on a journey through the idea of democracy.
Written by: David Graeber
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The Silk Roads
- A New History of the World
- Written by: Peter Frankopan
- Narrated by: Laurence Kennedy
- Length: 24 hrs and 4 mins
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Overall
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It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures, and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the 20th century - this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East.
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Epic Telling of History
- By chris bahrey on 2021-11-22
Written by: Peter Frankopan
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Origin
- A Genetic History of the Americas
- Written by: Jennifer Raff
- Narrated by: Tanis Parenteau, Jennifer Raff - Interview, Yvonne Russo - Interview
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Origin is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. Origin provides an overview of these new histories throughout North and South America, and a glimpse into how the tools of genetics reveal details about human history and evolution.
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Excellent book full of science and history
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Written by: Jennifer Raff
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Nomad Century
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- Narrated by: Gaia Vince
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
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Overall
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Drought-hit regions bleeding those who for whom a rural life has become untenable. Coastlines diminishing year on year. Wildfires and hurricanes leaving widening swaths of destruction. The culprit, most of us accept, is climate change, but not enough of us are confronting one of its biggest, and most present, consequences: a total reshaping of the earth’s human geography. As Gaia Vince points out early in Nomad Century, global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literal billions displaced in the coming decades.
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Essential and urgent
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From the best-selling author of The Templars, Dan Jones' epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built. Across 16 chapters, blending Dan Jones' trademark gripping narrative style with authoritative analysis, Powers and Thrones shows how, at each stage in this story, successive Western powers thrived by attracting - or stealing - the most valuable resources, ideas and people from the rest of the world.
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Excellent update to conventional Middle Adge Hist
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1491
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- Length: 16 hrs and 17 mins
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Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus' landing had crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago; existed mainly in small nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas were, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last 30 years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.
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This needs to be mandatory reading!
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Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
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Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.
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Major Labels
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Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music - as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities.
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loved it!
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A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.
Written by: Walter Benjamin
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A Brief History of Neoliberalism
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Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage.
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thumbs up
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The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.
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must read
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Slavoj Žižek's first book is a provocative and original work looking at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.
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👍🏻
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GR8 Discussion
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What does it mean to “be you” - that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it? There may be no more elusive or fascinating question. Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness to be a primarily spiritual or philosophical inquiry, but scientific research is now mapping out compelling biological theories and explanations for consciousness and selfhood.
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Excellent book!
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Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative.
Written by: James C. Scott
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Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason
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Karl Marx's Capital is one of the most important texts written in the modern era. Since 1867, when the first of its three volumes was published, it has had a profound effect on politics and economics in theory and practice throughout the world. But Marx wrote in the context of capitalism in the second half of the 19th century: his assumptions and analysis need to be updated in order to address the technological, economic, and industrial change that has followed Capital's initial publication.
Written by: David Harvey
Publisher's Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could only be achieved by sacrificing those original freedoms, or alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. Graeber and Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95% of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
What the critics say
"This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well-seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan)
“Synthesizing much recent scholarship, The Dawn of Everything briskly overthrows old and obsolete assumptions about the past, renews our intellectual and spiritual resources, and reveals, miraculously, the future as open-ended. It is the most bracing book I have read in recent years.” (Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger)
“Graeber and Wengrow have effectively overturned everything I ever thought about the history of the world. A thorough and elegant refutation of evolutionary theories of history, The Dawn of Everything introduces us to a world populated by smart, creative, complicated people who, for thousands of years, invented virtually every form of social organization imaginable and pursued freedom, knowledge, experimentation, and happiness way before ‘the Enlightenment.’ The authors don’t just debunk the myths; they give a thrilling intellectual history of how they came about, why they persist, and what it all means for the just future we hope to create. The most profound and exciting book I’ve read in thirty years.” (Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination)
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What listeners say about The Dawn of Everything
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- James Andrew Davis
- 2021-11-13
Being Critical of Assumptions
I can't stop thinking about this book. It was surprisingly global in its coverage (not too many historical texts reference the Inuit from Labrador). There are FOUR take-aways for me:
1. Our knowledge of prehistory was shaped, incorrectly, by 18th century French philosophers (namely Rousseau).
2. Human prehistory is not a series of progressive steps. Our collective story is much more complex. Ancient thinkers and even engineers had shockingly outstanding methods, ideas, techniques, and knowledge.
3. The Age of Enlightenment may very well have been based on American First Nations culture. We must not forget the timeline here (The Age of Enlightenment came after our contact with American First Nations).
4. Nearly all ancient cultures viewed social constructs as temporary. If a social system failed them, they walked away from it. We used to be able to construct a social system to accomplish a task, then abandon it. That's no longer the case.
The text even shakes my, perhaps naive, faith in our western institutions. Are we currently locked into a system that could be better?
The book is written by outstanding thinkers and they have done their homework.
5 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 2022-08-02
Not great but decent
Here's some context on my opinion: I have a Bachelor's in History, I've read Sapiens, and Guns, Germs and Steel. I am at best, an amateur historian. Honestly, this book was difficult to get through but at the same time it made good points. Here's my breakdown:
Good points made:
-Societies in the past have been very flexible in their structure and just because the style of the "West" "won" doesn't mean it was the best
-Pre-Colonial societies weren't "primitive," some where very complex and people were much more "free" than they were in Europe
-The Enlightenment could very well have been strongly influenced and started by the Indian critiques of European society
-around 9000BC, humans likely participated in "play farming" which is farming but not changing their lifestyle completely to be dependent on those crops
Cons:
-The book did not need to be 24 hours. It could have said the same in 9. The writing dragged on so much and it got way too caught in the details. This was almost the first audible book I didn't finish because it was so long-winded.
-It made some straw-man arguments to try to prove its point
3 people found this helpful
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- J. Cote
- 2022-10-20
Dreadful
So dreadfully disappointed in this piece of junk. He makes an assumption and never defends or proves it. He just blathers on and on about the supposed biases of western intellectuals and how they never ever how could possibly credit that indigenous civilizations have any sophistication whatsoever. Which is so ridiculous that made me stop reading. I'm very very angry about this
2 people found this helpful
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- Estefanía Roldán Nicolau
- 2022-09-13
The pronunciation of the performer is horrible
It's hard to keep up with the many authors the authors mention due to the poor performance of the person reading the book.
2 people found this helpful
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- Jason
- 2021-11-13
Wonderful!
An enjoyable journey through the origins of our origins. Highly recommended for those who are curious about how we have come to be and the systems that govern our species.
2 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 2023-01-28
Hard pass … horrible narration!
Worst ever voice / recording! Delete asap … message all good, but the delivery HORRIBLE! Get a voice, get a life … in a new job!
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- Sean A Marshall
- 2023-01-19
Fascinating but dense at moments
The exploration of the question of how global society ended up stuck in systems of inequality is a terrific one. Looking at it from a lens that goes deep into prehistoric societies was educational but at times a bit of a slog. Would recommend.
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- Jtoronto
- 2022-09-23
Fantastic and inspiring book
Highly recommend. The proposed concept that our historical knowledge os ancient societal norms may have a lot to teach us is provocative and far reaching.
Aside from its great content the reader’s performance is exceptionally good and captivating.
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- mani
- 2022-08-24
Bombastic titles
An anarchist response to Homo Sapiens & other Jarred Dimond inspired western centric world views of histories. It tries to retrace the previous (mis)conception of the origin of notions such as State, Family and Property. The titles however similar to HS are bombastic. It should be called Reflections on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
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- Josh White
- 2022-08-21
Ancient history revolutionary thought
I really enjoyed the thought that went behind ancient history and how different of a place it may have been. A must listen for people who want to understand and further conceptuallize the deep past. We are so caught up in our current paradigm that it is hard to conceive of anything else. I also appreciated the authors referencing of First Nation's cultures, its impacts on European thought and respecting people as people across both time and space.
The narrator was engaging and well spoken. Highly reccomended.
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- John Faithful Hamer
- 2021-11-19
ALMOST INVARIABLY
To extinguish hope, proponents of fashionable forms of determinism need to circumscribe our sense of what’s possible. They need us to believe that biology—or geography, or history—is destiny. They need us to believe that struggling against things like, say, market forces, is about as silly and stupid as struggling against gravity. Just as the god-kings of the ancient world claimed that their rule was an inescapable feature of the nature of things, those who benefit mightily from the twenty-first-century status quo would have us believe that their rule is inevitable, and this is the best of all possible worlds.
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s new book should actually be called: Almost Inevitably: A New History of Humanity (2021). In part, this is because they use the phrase “almost invariably” far too often; but mostly because the book’s message is, at bottom, that although some things are almost invariably inevitable, few things are actually inevitable. We have considerable wiggle room. We can make choices. We’ve done so in the past and we can do so again in the future. In other words: Another World is Possible.
If the deterministic narratives popularized by grand theorists like Steven Pinker, Yuval Noah Harari, and Jared Diamond leave you cold, if they depress you, or enrage you, you will almost invariably love The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021).