Reviews and Comments

Dara McAnulty presents many faces in a hopeful memoir: a teenager, a complex and astute nature enthusiast, a sensitive autistic, a member of a loving Northern Irish family, an environmental activist and an eloquent writer. None of these tells the whole story but all are relevant in this diary of one year in his life.

The writing is at its best when it is poetically focussed on nature, particularly birds. In these moments it is like reading JA Baker, putting across the beauty of nature through perfectly chosen words and descriptions of moments. The depictions of his autism and his family are also wonderfully revealing and carefully considered. The moments of activism (and occasional linked anger) are the only ones that seem to lose the run of the book and become too polarised. But the diary is a marvel and a fascinating insight into a great mind and a section of the hopeful youth that are coming of age today.

As a fan of Sara Baume, I was looking forward to this book. In the end, I'm a little disappointed. The writing and imagination captures moments brilliantly, as always, but the book's story is not engaging and it stutters to a stop without ever really getting started. It surrounds a couple and their two dogs as they form a life in the countryside after years of city living. They are watched over by the mountain, one of several active characters in the landscape.

Despite some good moments, Seven Steeples feels a little more like a study for two actors building character for a play than a work of literature, even an experimental one. And there is also an inexplicable use of spacing at times

that seems designed to do something with beat but never seems to make sense when it's used. The overall result is a little too self-aware, with no real enjoyment left for the reader.

A tale of two David's: Graeber's final book, co-authored with Wengrow, is an epic volume of archaeology and anthropology that decentres and challenges accepted patterns of western thought that many social scientists present as facts. In particular, the authors take aim at books like Sapiens by showing how they proliferate accepted but unproven myths about human behaviour without following the evidence. As a book of critique and challenge, it is funny, thoughtful, and sharp. Some of the ideas, such as that the European idea of democracy may have originated from colonised Native American cultures, are radical but well argued.

Despite this, there are some flaws. A couple of chapters run far too long with too much repetition, and the scope of societies that are used to construct the arguments is limited. Also, there is a repeated insistence of humanist thought, dismissing animal or nonhuman relationships as unrelated to the story. This seems to reinforce another myth of exceptionalism and also ignores many of the beliefs and philosophies of the same cultures that are held up as examples in the book.

Despite these flaws, the challenges and ideas are well worth reading and considering in a frame of knowledge, and the writing (particularly Graeber's signature biting wit) is excellent.