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PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, OR THE REAL LIBERTALIA by David Graeber

Submitted by mcutler on
Posted on January 27, 2023 in
PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, OR THE REAL LIBERTALIA by David Graeber
David Graeber’s PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, OR THE REAL LIBERTALIA, the final posthumous work by the co-author of THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING, published this week to critical acclaim. Peter Frankopan calls it a “slim, feisty book,” in his review for The New York Times, adding: “Graeber’s challenge is to try to make sense of a set of sources that are unreliable or obtuse, and often written either many decades after events they describe or many thousands of miles away — or both…[He] is heroic to try to square a series of circles…David Graeber was a highly original thinker and a wonderful writer. Most of all he was someone who sought out challenging problems and set about trying to solve them.” Meanwhile, a review from Jatin Dua for Science/AAAS praises the book as an “elegantly breezy treatise [that] takes readers on a journey to the monsoonal waters of the Indian Ocean and the verdant landscape of Madagascar,” adding: “In his academic writing and political commitments, David Graeber exemplified an ethos of action and conversation. There is a certain bittersweetness to this text, one that ends with an exhortation toward the arts of speaking and conversation. Graeber himself is no longer around to speak, to debate, or to inspire protest and action. As anthropologists have noted, gifts are inalienable—they contain within them something of the giver. Graeber’s final book is certainly such a gift.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux published PIRATE ENLIGHTMENT, OR THE REAL LIBERTALIA on January 24, 2023.