This is a history of humanity like it's never been told before. Historian Alvin Finkel builds on the work of archaeologists, anthropologists and historians to present the very long view of the history of the human species. His focus is not on the leaders whose exploits are recounted in traditional histories, but rather on the experiences of ordinary people, the 99%, whose experiences and activities are often overlooked. In the extensive research of many contemporary scholars, Alvin Finkel notes a common thread which most historians have ignored: the constant efforts of ordinary people throughout history to create and sustain societies based on equality of all individuals. Contrary to traditional historical writing, he finds that the earliest human communities usually treated all individuals as equals. In the histories of societies all around the world, he records how individuals who found ways to gain wealth and power have faced constant, often successful, resistance from the rest. From the first recorded communities in Mesopotamia to the COVID-19 pandemic, this book features the resistances, uprisings, struggles, and solidarities of the majority against those seeking to dominate. The result is a fresh and challenging interpretation of the history of our species, one that casts a new light on the true nature of humans.

An unforgettable novel of an American suburb devastated by a fiendish madman—the most ambitious and important work yet by “the 21st century answer to William Burroughs” (Publishers Weekly). Blake Butler’s fiction has dazzled readers with its dystopian dreamscapes and swaggering command of language. Now, in his most topical and visceral novel yet, he ushers us into the consciousness of two men in the shadow of a bloodbath: Gretch Gravey, a cryptic psychopath with a small army of burnout followers, and E. N. Flood, the troubled police detective tasked with unpacking and understanding his mind. A mingled simulacrum of Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Thomas Harris’s Buffalo Bill, Gravey is a sinister yet alluring God figure who enlists young metal head followers to kidnap neighboring women and bring them to his house—where he murders them and buries their bodies in a basement crypt. Through parallel narratives, Three Hundred Million lures readers into the cloven mind of Gravey—and Darrel, his sinister alter ego—even as Flood’s secret journal chronicles his own descent into his own, eerily similar psychosis. A portrait of American violence that conjures the shadows of Ariel Castro, David Koresh, and Adam Lanza, Three Hundred Million is a brutal and mesmerizing masterwork, a portrait of contemporary America that is difficult to turn away from, or to forget.