It feels odd giving anything but an enthusiastic review to a book co-authored by the late, great David Graeber, but I'm afraid this one didn't really work for me. In my (and perhaps the book's?) partial defence, the circumstances weren't ideal. I read it as an ebook (so hard to flip back to check on facts) and, what's more, as a library ebook (so with limited time to finish it). I also haven't really been firing on all cylinders over the break, so maybe that's part of the problem? Anyway, if you take all those mitigating factors away, what I think we're left with is a book that somewhat uncomfortably straddles an attempt to provide a comprehensive, but alternative, 'big history', with an attempt to advance a counter to the default assumption of a teleology of societal evolution, that holds that agriculture is inevitable (and so hunter-gatherers are really just proto-farmers) together with an assumption that the surplus that agriculture provides will inevitably lead to administration, bureaucracy, and loss of freedom. If felt to me that the latter arguments were rather lost in the weight of historical/pre-historical detail, while the former big history was hard to follow as it jumped around trying to justify the argument. It's also, to be frank, a pretty long book, which seems to me to require either stamina (which I seem to be lacking at the moment) or a compelling narrative (which also seemed to be lacking). There was lots of good stuff offering an alternative to Eurocentric views on North American prehistory, and it would probably work pretty well as something to dip into for such insights, but for me, as a straight read-through, I'm afraid it didn't really work.