This was a great book. It seems less well-known in the HN-sphere than Seeing Like A State, but it's at least as good IMHO. It really changed my mental model of the dynamics of early states and "barbarians", and how agriculture interplayed with the story of how it all unfolded.

My one criticism was that when answering the question "why did people start eating grains", he never seemed to consider that it could simply be that people enjoy eating them.