Description:
Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews.
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future--to imagine a social order based on humans' fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time-- inequality, technology, the identity of "the West," democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest--he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different. During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . ., edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovsky and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber's enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker.Brief description: David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, among many others books, and coauthor with David Wengrow of the New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything. An iconic thinker and a renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020.
Review Quotes:
"Both delightful and instructive . . . The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World ... offers us a sprightly introduction to Graeber's ideas and encourages us, in our own turn, to question accepted pieties." --Steven Shaviro, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The 18 pieces collected here showcase the range of Graeber's interests, along with his recurring preoccupations: inequality and capitalism, bureaucracy and creativity . . . His playful cultural commentary even extended to Hollywood . . . But it was his more sustained political and economic arguments that secured his iconoclastic reputation." --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review