The Dawn of Everything

Reviews of the Dawn of Everything have been largely favorable.

The New Yorker says the book “aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past.”[5] The Atlantic describes the book as “inspiring”.[6] The Boston Review describes the book as “erudite” and “funny”.[7] The Jacobin claims that “Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what [Galileo and Darwin] did to astronomy and biology respectively.”[8]

The Tribute Magazine said it was comparable in caliber to the works of Galileo and Darwin and does to history what those two did to astronomy and biology respectively.[9]

While wondering whether a book that “hypothesizes confidently in the face of scant or confusing evidence, can be trusted”, the Nation describes the book as “a work of dizzying ambition”.[10] Despite claims of factual “cherrypicking”, reviews in the Guardian describe the book as both “ambitious” and “exhilarating”.[11]

Although the Times Higher Education Supplement claims that the Dawn of Everything “begins far too late, systematically side-stepping the cultural flowering that began in Africa tens of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe”, the review also says that the book is “exhilarating”.[12] The New York Review of Books claims that there is a “discordance between what the book says and what its sources say", but also that the book, which is “chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read”.[13] Wengrow later refuted the discordance with sources by comparing sections of the book with sections of the sources referenced.[14]

• Official website