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woodweird's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
benyoda95's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.5
This book was very academic and if I'm bring honest, there were many times that I had difficulty following what the authors were saying and keeping track of the different societies discussed. I have a hard time recommending this to someone without at least a little experience with anthropology or philosophy.
That being said, I did enjoy this book. I appreciated the deconstruction of many myths that I believed about the progression of societies. It did a great job of posing counter examples to common misconceptions and reinforced some fundamental truths. Growth and progress are not linear nor are they uniform. Humans are complex and so are our societies. The simplest answer is not always the right one, especially when we recognize that what we consider to be simple in the case of societies growth, can sometimes just mean European. Where we are now was not graunreed, and is not necessarily the best, but growth is always an option that we can strive for.
That being said, I did enjoy this book. I appreciated the deconstruction of many myths that I believed about the progression of societies. It did a great job of posing counter examples to common misconceptions and reinforced some fundamental truths. Growth and progress are not linear nor are they uniform. Humans are complex and so are our societies. The simplest answer is not always the right one, especially when we recognize that what we consider to be simple in the case of societies growth, can sometimes just mean European. Where we are now was not graunreed, and is not necessarily the best, but growth is always an option that we can strive for.
thereadingsnail99's review against another edition
5.0
One of the most important, eye opening, revealing, and revolutionary books I have ever read. Should be required reading for all (and I’m deeply sad it probably will never be). The reckoning(s) this book leads one to at both a personal, regional, national, and global scale is just awe inspiring. I appreciated the incorporation of indigenous and feminist lines of thought (though certainly there could have been more, and some of their language still felt oddly sexist despite their seeming progressivism… that being said…) - wildly important book that will make you reconsider everything you think you know about the world, it’s history, who we are, and why we are the way we are today.
daniel_wood's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
samanthasimonsen's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
This book is full of some very interesting ideas and interesting anecdotes, but that’s all I got out of it. This took me months to listen to on audiobook and never really grabbed me. On the one hand, I think I would have gotten much more out of it if I had read a physical copy; on the other hand, I never would have finished the physical copy at all. Some of the arguments were not entirely persuasive to me, but I hope that this will be the start of a host of new scholarship, and that some of the future works on this topic will be more digestible.