[PaulAJ]

I've read "Debt: The First 5,000 Years". It is not a work of genius. It is a rambling incoherent mess. Graeber cherry-picks bits of real history, anecdotes and random myths, and shoehorns them into some kind of predefined narrative which seems to equate modern notions of debt (with its limited liability, bankruptcy and non-inheritance) with the kind of chattel debt-slavery that existed in the past.

I say "seems to" because it is genuinely hard to tell. He will be talking about the temple-banks of ancient Sumer or the customs of the Maori, and then suddenly go off on a long diatribe about how this compares to modern banking. Hidden away in this will be a bald assertion prefixed by "of course" which left me screaming "citation needed!". If you weren't watching for it you might miss it. But once you spot it you realise that the whole of the rest of the chapter just collapsed into meaningless drivel.

I cannot think that this guy was a genius.

[q1w2]

It's a political book. Graeber, an self-described anarchist, looks through the archeological record for evidence that non-hierarchical societies existed successfully.

Everyone in that political area calls him a "genius" because he offers them a rich trove of new "evidence" to support their modern politics.

It's an inconvenient truth that the experts in these individual fields don't agree with his conclusions.