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cmcrockford's review
5.0
Graphic: War, Genocide, and Colonisation
Moderate: Rape, Religious bigotry, Murder, Sexual violence, and Racism
laurareads87's review against another edition
5.0
Absolutely fantastic. In this wide ranging, ambitious book, "the Davids" pick apart deep seated presumptions underlying much of anthropology and history and demonstrate that not only are these assumptions not aligned with facts, but that they are rooted in ideological commitments that refuse to allow the possibility that ancient ways of organizing societies were the result of deliberation and decision-making. Dismantling assumptions like 'cities that are complex need hierarchies' and 'social development is determined by technology,' the Davids discuss examples of early societies from all over the world as experimenting with how best to live and organize themselves and ask how it is that unlike our ancestors, many of whom lived in societies that oscillated between different political systems seasonally, many of us can barely even imagine alternate forms of social, political, and economic life.
Minor: Confinement, Xenophobia, Sexism, War, Antisemitism, Slavery, Torture, Racism, Rape, Sexual violence, and Murder
ka_cam's review
4.5
Moderate: Slavery, Genocide, Colonisation, War, Violence, Sexual violence, Racism, Domestic abuse, Torture, and Misogyny
Minor: Cannibalism, Classism, Death, Domestic abuse, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Pandemic/Epidemic, Suicide, and Trafficking
sohva's review against another edition
3.75
Moderate: Colonisation
Minor: Rape, Suicide, Slavery, Animal death, Religious bigotry, Torture, War, Violence, Physical abuse, Murder, Genocide, and Racism