by David Graeber
First half 5 stars, second half 3 stars.When I was in the 5th grade, we had a social studies unit centered around a book called Life On Paradise Island. It was a cartoonish book that told the tale of how a modern economy is developed. It started with the islanders trading coconuts for fish. Of cours...
This comic does in one cartoon what the first chapter of Debt, the First 5000 Years does (pretty well) in one chapter. That said, Debt is really worth your time. You only have to look at the length of the other reviews this book has generated -- and the deep thought and critique contained within t...
Iconoclastic and brilliant -- this is the kind of book where you feel like the scales have fallen from your eyes, and you want to stand on street corners handing out copies and proselytizing. I'll admit frankly there's a lot about finance and debt that still completely puzzles me, but Graeber's thes...
Putting this back into the TBR pile until I'm done with Qing social history -- trying to manage two nonnarrative nonfiction books at once just makes me feel distracted and burdened.
You only have to look at the length of the other reviews this book has generated -- and the deep thought and critique contained within them -- to realize that this is a book worthy of your time. Graeber's examination of the history of debt and its role in civilization has forced me to re-examine ev...
David Graeber is a former professor of Anthropology at Yale and he currently works in the Social Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London; he is also an outspoken Anarchist. He has most recently been in the news because of his participation in the General Assemblies of the Occupy ...
Yep. Amazing.
If you've never thought about money and credit in a historical sense, this book is fascinating. It's too much to describe, but basically it was about the difference and interplay between human economies and money economies and why money can suck so much.I got a little lost during the Middle Ages, b...
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