Monthly Archives: December, 2019

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Karl Polanyi)

The Great Transformation, published in 1944, is an ambitious book. It attempts two huge tasks. First, to refute the free market ideology, sometimes called...

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia (Christina Thompson)

Interest in Polynesia is not much in fashion nowadays, except for using the islands as an exemplar of the claimed, always imminent yet never...

A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life (Nicolas Diat)

A Time to Die is a small gem of a book which works on two levels. On one level, it is a self-examination for...

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (David Graeber)

I am trying to understand how human beings create value through their actions, and what that implies for humanity. Although this goal is hardly...

The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz)

We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes. We watch movies, and we instinctively put ourselves in the place of the hero, not in...