A lot of the negative Amazon reviews, at least, comprise complaints that Graeber doesn't address or defend points that he actually does, usually a paragraph or two after they're raised. They don't claim the points are poorly defended or explained, but that they're not, when they 100% for sure are.
The book's very well-constructed that way, actually—make assertions that the thinking reader will have objections to or questions about, proceed to directly call out and address same in following paragraphs—but apparently some people's eyes go so red on reading something they don't immediately agree with that they totally miss the explanation and defense that follows. In short, many of them accuse the book of specific sins it did not commit. Others don't provide enough specific criticism to be analyzable, usually accusing it of the same sorts of problems but without enough details to tell whether the reviewer's just a bad reader like a lot of the other people dumping on it.
Possibly there are good negative reviews out there, but a good percentage of them seem to be folks who are, bluntly, not literate enough to read the book—though it's far from a challenging read.
I picked it up because it is so frequently recommended on HN, and it is much less...academic(?) than I was hoping for. It gets recommended as a great explanation of debt, but it read a lot more like a very biased opinion about debt coupled with what felt like rather cherry picked history. I'm going to try reading it again, but the first time didn't go well...
>I'm going to try reading it again, but the first time didn't go well..
All history is viewed through the eyes of the author's politics. I accept that, and set my personal politics aside and considered his history. One of the major positives of this book is its ambitious scope. The narrative spans millenia of history and I respect that ambition.
I don't agree with everything Graeber says but he proposes new ideas (to me at least). Those new ideas are fun to consider and think about.
I agree completely with your first sentence. I feel like when reading history, though, there is what happened, and there is the story about what happened. Sometimes it's basically impossible to have one without the other, but sometimes it's not, and I think what's compelling about Graeber is the story he tells about debt, but it didn't feel to me like he tried very hard to disentangle his facts from how he felt about them. But like I said, I do need to read the book again.
