The Saturday Morning Post (No. 90) EXTRA! EXTRA!

 ANOTHER SUNDAY REVIEW!

This was the other book I picked up at the library. It's a non-fiction book that one of the BookTubers said that it was one of his best books of 2024. The subject sounded interesting, so I decided to give my first book in 2025 a try.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity  by David Graeber & David Wengrow  DNF (Heck, I hardly started it.)

As I said in my intro, this sounded very interesting. It tells the story of what modern research has revealed about the lives of people who lived in "prehistory". Which is to say,  the several million years of humanity before recorded history. The major premise of their book is that we've gotten the wrong idea about how things where, and only in the last decade or two of archeology have we began to have a better understanding of their lives and how they have affected ours. The problem is, for me, that they seemed mostly intent on arguing their case, rather than telling their story.

The first two chapters recount the two old mainstream schools of thought about early man, and their philosophical, social, and economic repercussions. The first school of thought is some version of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that humans were hunter-gathers living in a state of prolonged childhood innocence in small, egalitarian bands. It was subsequent the rise of agriculture and cities that put an end to this innocence with laws, and a top down social order. On the other hand, we had Thomas Hobbes's contention that humans are selfish creatures living solitary, poor, nasty, brutish short lives and that any progress from this state is due to the development of governments, courts, and police in cities, which is to say the very things Rousseau saw as evils. The authors talk about these ideas and the political an economic fallout from them for the next 77 pages. No doubt fascinating reading if you're a poli-sci major, but philosophy, sociology, economic, and political debates are not in my wheelhouse. I was here for the history of the prehistory. So I skipped these two chapters hoping to start learning about early humans.

While they did start out talking about our earliest ancestors, explaining how diverse they actually where, not only in Africa, but around the world. And how the common idea of humanity coming out of Africa in one great movement, is not now considered valid. The problem for me, however, was that they continued arguing their case, always pointing out the perceived errors in previous understandings, and doing so in a very wordy fashion. I don't care about how wrong everyone was before them, I wanted to learn about how pre-historic people lived and society evolved. As Joe Friday might say, "Just the facts, Gents."  I would've loved to learn what they were saying in a more concise way with a lot of illustrations, maps and timelines, but running 536 pages long, with another 150 pages of notes, without very many illustrations, this book is simply not for me.

I'm sure this is an important book with lots of interesting lessons to tell about the people who lived before us - how they lived with so little in such a hostile world. But...  For the right person this book would be a great read.