There are quite a few very large claims made within the text, although I'm only about a quarter of the way through it right now. I'm interested in hearing what others have to say about it; the press surrounding the book has been adulatory, which is to be expected, I think.
The closest I have found to an academic review is a fairly critical blog post by the scholar Peter Turchin, written in response to an earlier essay by Graeber and Wengrow which makes the same argument as their subsequent book.
The review in 'The Nation' is also critical of the historical scholarship but doesn't go into as much detail as Turchin.
In contrast, Emily Kern is overwhelmingly positive in the Boston Review, finding nothing to critique where the work intersects her expertise, but she also sidesteps the basic question of why hierarchical systems are omnipresent or why the varied social experimentation Graeber argues for lost out repeatedly.
On the whole, Turchin echoes many of the critiques I've read of Graeber's earlier work.
Graeber writes fast-moving readable works aimed at a wide audience. The books are full of fascinating detail and raise some interesting questions; but tend to misrepresent or overstate evidence for Graeber's thesis.
The book seems to have sold well, and has generated a slew of entirely uncritical reviews from journalists; so we might see some formal academic reviews in the future.
[Edited to add more detail]
I hope more historians will engage with some of the claims in this book. It’s really quite disorienting as a lay reader and as I’m reading I frequently find myself wishing I had an AskHistorians commenter there with me to assess if their claims and sources are valid
I’m curious what people thought about the section at the end where they are talking about innovation, and they say “we don’t know who the first person to put yeast into bread to make it rise was, but we’re fairly certain it was a woman.”
In some ways that feels like a feminist statement, but at the same time, it seems to be imposing modern, western concepts of gender on the past. Honestly, we have no idea how gender was thought of in the early Neolithic, and I see no reason to assume it was binary. There are plenty of cultures (both past and present) that think of gender differently - e.g. non-binary, more than two genders, etc.
And I raise this question as a feminist archaeologist working on a related topic.