China In Ten Words

By Yu Hua

I worry sometimes about my Education. I always thought it was like, pretty good, I got good grades in a wide variety of subjects, but then something like The Cultural Revolution comes to the fore and I am just astonishingly...

Pirate Enlightenment

By David Graeber

This book is a fascinating little history of Madagascar and the kingdoms and societies during the golden age of piracy. I (and I imagine I am not unique here) know little of this corner of the world and corner of...

The Wretched Of The Earth

By Frantz Fanon

Brilliant! Thought-provoking and insightful into the forces and structures of decolonialization, and a bit challenging. The prefaces by Sartre and particularly Homi K Bhabha (sesquipedalian though it is) do an excellent job of contextualizing the rest. It is a bit...

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

By Walter Rodney

The primary thrust of this book - using dialectical materialist/Marxist analysis to demonstrate the evils of Colonialism - seems kind of wild to me, from a historiographical standpoint. The only people who I can imagine these days denying the abstract...

Dawn of Everything

By David Graeber and David Wengrow

Graerber and Wengrow paint a compelling and beautiful painting of new potentials for understanding the past & present. They set up a neat dichotomy between a Rousseaun and Hobbesian view of the origins of humanity, before bravely pointing out that...

The Devil in the White City:

By Erik Larson

There Never Was a West

By David Graeber