"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 "That [Graeber's] thoughts continue to surprise, challenge and confuse us says a great deal about the depth of his intellectual creativity . The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World is an entertaining smorgasbord of his ideas.
" --Daniel Susskind, Times Literary Supplement "This brilliant posthumous collection . serves as a revealing portrait of Graeber himself . Graeber argues that people don't need to be coerced into cooperation, and aren't purely self-interested actors, but are inherently motivated by the desire to find consensus . It's an invigorating testament to a life spent challenging the status quo." -- Publisher's Weekly (starred review) "A fine overview of [Graeber's] cage-rattling career." -- Kirkus Reviews "These essays brim with surprising angles, unexpected perspectives, and a joyful interest in the world. Graeber's abilities as an anthropologist, a professor, a nonviolent organizer, and an interpreter of anarchism all come together in a jovial prose." -- Library Journal "[David Graeber's work] undercuts a lot of conventional thinking.
Pointing out the many options that there are for developing more enlightened, more free societies, not just the ones encoded in our artificial traditions.I think that's a tremendous contribution." --Noam Chomsky "David's superpower was being an outsider. He did not proceed from widely shared assumptions but sought to dismantle them, urging us to see they're arbitrary, confining, and optional, and inviting everyone into the spaces this opens up (while saluting those already there). So much of his writing says, in essence, 'What happens if we don't accept this?'--if we dissect it to see its origins and impacts or if we reject it, if we lift it off like some burden we don't have to carry, some outfit we don't have to wear. What happens is we get free: his is an analysis for the sake of liberation, liberatory in its means and its ends. In that, it's a gift, and a generous one. Thank you, David.
" --from the foreword by Rebecca Solnit.