Are you even reading this review if you do not know who Graeber is? If so, you have made a weird choice.

This book is a posthumous collection of Graeber's work: mostly essays and articles but one interview. While there is some thematic grouping, the essays vary in tone, topic, and density.

The ideological consanguinity between Graeber and myself is small but non-zero. I do generally like his writing. His writing is often flip, but it also has more internal structure to it than many of the more throbbingly sentimental arguments of the contemporary right and left: it is easy to disagree with because he is articulating a position with coherent statements rather than scoring points. He has a bad habit of begging the question, to the point it is a sort of PBS pledge drive for the question, complete with petitio principii mug and tote bag, and deserves its own drinking game or unit of measurement. It is fun. It is not without meaning that some of the articles include discussing the nature of play ("What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun?") or trying to understand the volatile effect of playfulness in protest. ("Dead Zones of Imagination").

The best article here is "Culture as a Creative Refusal," an investigation of how societies structure themselves by looking at what they don't choose, and how that might be reflected in the history of the Malgasy. "There Never was a West" is good, but meanders.

I do not have a least favorite, but some of the material aged poorly. The request for more political hate from 2015 feels monkey's finger curls inward, and I was surprised to learn that inflation no longer exists. The achronological grouping of the articles, particularly in the way that some of them are the sort of precursors to later, more developed work where he did not end up where he started.

The joke at the beginning of this review has some teeth to it. If you do not like Graeber, this book will not change your opinion, and if you do not know Graeber, this is a bad introduction. Or just read the first and last essays and skip the rest, because there is no real logic to this grouping.

I can imagine the two or one star version of this review, where I savage his pointedly off-balance logic and in writing this review I kept wondering why it is that I like his writing, even when and especially because I disagree with so many of his conclusions. And I think that it is because he knows how to ask the right questions. He has a core philosophical stance about how much of the world operates as assumption not fact, and I think that leads him to see where the real joints are in the whole system of everything. That is useful, and has application far in excess of his political intent.

My thanks, and condolences, to Nika Dubrovsky, for this work and to the publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, for making the ARC available to me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing the ebook in exchange for my honest review.

For those familiar with Graeber's books, this book is the collection of his deeper ideas and thoughts. It's an engaging read that remains interesting and feels relevant to today's issues, giving readers a comprehensive picture of his insightful perspectives. It invites readers to consider hidden truth that should be openly discussed. Thus, readers understand their rights and the complexities of social issues.

I found this book both informative and enjoyable. Even though some parts are written in sentences that are too long for me, and the topics are areas with which I am not familiar and have no background, I still understood it well and gained new knowledge that I had not known before. It is a great book for anyone interested in various issues affecting our civilization across different eras.