I’m about a quarter through listening to the audiobook of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow. Graeber you may know as the author of Bullshit Jobs amongst other anarchist tomes, and this was a ten year project with Wengrow completed just before he died.

It looks like it might be a daunting dry tome but it’s surprisingly light and fun, helped in no small part by Malk Williams’s reading, reminiscent of Peter Jones’s performance of The Book in Hitchhikers.

The vibe is mostly “everything you’ve been told about the history of western civilisation is mostly wrong, or at best a bit more complicated”. There’s some lovely insights into the nature of pre-colonial civilisations but mostly it’s a gentle but damning teardown of anthropological assumptions about the superiority of western European culture and the inevitability of our systems of governance.

Their left-anarchist anti-capitalist hearts are clearly on their sleeves but there’s no stern hectoring, nor is there any sense of “well actually…” which would quickly get annoying. It’s fun!