This is a brilliant, clear, refreshing and fabulous book. It is the kind of book that only comes along every decade or so. The Dawn of Everything draws on recent archaeological evidence and anthropological insight to say highly salient things about human history.
The authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, say: most accounts of pre-modern human history “simply aren’t true, they have dire political implications, and make the past dull.” This is interesting, not least because this book is also about the future.
The authors are willing to call out many contemporary commentators who believe in linear evolution of human ideas and cultures (the ecological determinists and evolutionary psychologists, for example), and who say that modern life must be superior to all that has gone before. Graeber and Wengrow call these “dismal conclusions”, and “prejudices dressed up as facts.”
For this book is about freedoms, not the “weird arguments” made by many in support of modern and high-consumption ways of living and organizing. We are neither at the top nor the end of a process of betterment. What has gone before was more diverse, egalitarian and astonishing than many would think.
Human cultures of the past have always diverged; they have not converged on one model perceived as more advanced or even perfect. And this is where the future comes in: we need imagination and divergence to create climate and nature recovery. It's difficult, but not impossible.
And this is where story comes in: it opens up new paths, focuses on right and wrong, and fosters togetherness. Do read this book. It will change your worlds.
[Ben: if you can make a link to another site, I wrote a blog about this: https://climatecultures.net/review/the-next-dawn-of-everything-stories-of-human-cultures/]
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction…
Katherine Rundell writes for children. In this gorgeous short book, she tells us why adults should read children's books too. It is all about hope, agency, and transforming the world ahead of us.
For it is all about story-telling, and this is vital for all ages. Story tells children how to grow up to be good people; story tells adults what to do.
Katherine Rundell says: "those who write for children are trying to arm them for life." And yet children books and fairy tales have a long and noble history of being dismissed. She tells of the famed UK male author of fiction who has said, "If I had a serious brain injury, I might well write a children's book." Ha! I suspect children wouldn't want to read it anyway, even if he did have a go.
Children's books say this, say this author: "the world is huge, ... and hope counts for something."
Children are sometimes chided for telling tales; told they are imagining things. And yet, this is precisely what we need when we face a scary world of change and crisis. Imagination, hope, togetherness, and story. The author also notes: children's books are written for a section of society that has no political or economic power.
What a lovely book, by one of the finest of children's authors.
A pocket-sized, unmissable essay on the importance of children's literature by the bestselling and award-winning author, Katherine Rundell. _______________
'It's a very short book but it packs a real punch... A real delight' - Financial Times
'Rundell is the real deal, a writer of boundless gifts and extraordinary imaginative power whose novels will be read, cherished and reread long after most so-called "serious" novels are forgotten' - Observer
'Rundell's pen is gold-tipped' - Sunday Times _______________
Katherine Rundell - Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and prize-winning author of five novels for children - explores how children's books ignite,…
This is a wonderful and beautifully written book about the power of story. Story is not just about information and persuasion. It is about rehearsal for life; it is about creating confidence and agency. It is about transformation.
We face huge crises of climate, nature and social inequality. What people don't need is more data, more facts. We know the problems; we actually know many of the solutions. So how to do that thing that wakes us up with excitement and the desire to make a difference? The Red Queen said, "why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lisa Cron tells us to forget the facts, and give people what their brain craves: story in which we can become immersed, the sense of flow, and something to remember (and maybe pass onto others). We don't remember a thing about what that person said, says a child, but he sure was smart.
Lisa Cron shows how story is about inner realisations that lead to transformations. Our lives are full of transformative moments, ratchets when there's no going back. Story helps us cross the thresholds when the world ahead is scary as hell. You just might the ones who then change the world.
“A practical, heartfelt manual for anyone who needs to change minds and actions. Lisa Cron shares the art of practical empathy with leaders who care enough to make a difference.”—Seth Godin, author of The Practice
A step-by-step guide to using the brain's hardwired need for story to achieve any goal, from the author of Wired for Story
Whether you're pitching a product, saving the planet, or convincing your kids not to text and drive, story isn't just one way to persuade. It's the way. It's built into the architecture of the brain, and has been since early humans gathered around…
There are shadows on this shining sea. Fish cities have shrunk to hamlets, old ports have been levelled and harbours are full of warming water yet there’s barely a single ship. The climate crisis has come. Ice and glaciers are melting .
A burnished trawler skipper from the east coast of England said, “You know, we were more tolerant and kind in those days, when we sailed across the sea and brought home gifts and stories.”
Sea Sagas of the North is about the tales and sagas of heroic crossings in the waters of the North Sea and North Atlantic, circling clockwise from Iceland to Norway, Denmark, east and north England, to the Atlantic isles of Shetland, St Kilda and the Faroes, closing back at the melting ice and fire of Iceland.
I visited 160 ports, seaside settlements and islands facing and edging the North Sea and North Atlantic. I travelled on Viking longship, oyster smack and spritsail barge, lifeboat and post boat, iron ferry and wooden ferry, trawler and whaler, rowed and motored painter; and visited trawler and ship museum, whaling station, shipyard and dock. And then wrote stories about the people of these coasts and isles, as they created identity and meaning for living.
Sea Sagas of the North weaves prose chapters and alliterative sagas. This is the territory of sagas, the Norse and Anglo-Saxon gods of old, the mythic era of Viking expansion by clinkered longships, when dragons protected people from themselves by hiding golden hoards.
