DNF at p.211, 4 February

Stopped on the wheat chapter. Not because it's wrong, but because I could not work out what it would take for it to be wrong; and that is the trouble with the whole book. Every claim arrives already settled.

The sentence that finished it was the one about how we did not domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us. It's a nice inversion. It is also a way of saying very little while sounding as though you have said something enormous, and by then I had taken four of them in a row on the chin.

I don't object to a big sweep. I read a fair amount of long-view history and I'm happy to be told what to think about the Neolithic by someone who has done the reading. But this one compresses a real scholarly argument into a punchy line and then builds the following chapter on the punchy line rather than the argument. By the time he reaches money and religion he is doing the same move with considerably more at stake.

Two people at work recommended it to me in the same month, which should have been the warning. Books everybody has read at once tend to be books that are easy to have read.

Read instead: The Dawn of Everything. Annoying in entirely different ways, and it shows you its seams.

Three. Four if it were half the length.