Although there was lots of interesting material I felt the discussion needed more signposts to guide the reader as to the specific relevance to debt. The titles of the chapters indicate the breadth of the issues discussed: Cruelty and Redemption, A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations, Games with Sex and Death, Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundations of Contemporary Civilization. The discussion draws on anthropology, religion, philosophy and literature. The first half (chapters one and four to seven) addresses the idea of debt in the context of a wider, mainly anthropological, discussion of the nature of exchange and socio-economic relations in human societies. I found the second half of the book much easier to read than the first. It is a long book that seems to fall into two halves that could almost form the basis of separate books. It must be read from page one or treated more like an encyclopedia. After several enthusiastic attempts to start reading at different points it became clear this is a book that cannot be read systematically. The downside is that it is hard to grasp the threads of the book. Opening the page at any point will engage the reader in some intriguing nugget of information. It is one of those books in which the footnotes almost stand alone as a source of information and debate. There are almost forty pages of references and sixty pages of footnotes. The information comes so densely packed, crossing disciplines and eras, that the reader is almost overwhelmed.

To mix metaphors it is a mine of information. The scholarship is immense, covering fields from anthropology, politics, economics, philosophy, history, sociology, religion, culture. It is full of thought-provoking gems: evidence, anecdotes, insights, challenges.

Graeber debt