
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 704 pages, $35
There's a simple story about life before civilization, retold by evolutionary scholars and New York Times bestsellers like Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow summarize it skeptically in their big new book, The Dawn of Everything.