The wheat chapter, and my one quibble

The wheat chapter is the one everybody quotes and it is the one I have the most fun arguing with. The idea that wheat domesticated us rather than the other way round is a good line, it is not a new line, and it works far better as provocation than as history. Also, and this is small but it is mine: "wheat" here covers at least two species with different ploidy and separate domestication stories (einkorn, Triticum monococcum, and emmer, T. dicoccon, are not interchangeable, and their loss-of-shattering mutations arose independently), and the book flattens them into one crop with one motive.

None of which matters much to the argument, and I want to be fair. As a book to hand to a clever eighteen year old it is close to unbeatable. My nephew read it in a fortnight and then spent Christmas dinner interrogating everyone at the table about money being a shared fiction, which was the best value we have had out of a paperback in years.

Where I stop trusting it is the confidence. It moves at one speed and asserts everything at the same volume, the well established and the frankly speculative alike, and if you happen to know a field it passes through you can feel where the corners have been taken off. I know exactly one field. It got the corners taken off. Does that sink the book? No. It does mean I read the rest of it a good deal more slowly.

Still an eight. Three days of a rained-off survey week in a very damp cottage outside Hawes, and it was better company than the weather was.