This book is wild. I greatly recommend reading it if you're on the spectrum. A large part of my social life is occupied with finding plausible reasons underpinning peoples' behavior and this book is a rich source of them. My sole critique is that the book hits extremely hard the first few chapters and then the rest of the book is just ceaseless meandering through practices of various historical & contemporary cultures, but yeah - really that means you only need to read the first few chapters to get 90% of the benefit of the book.

I feel like a lot of the scenarios in this book could be put on some kind of final exam for autistic social interaction. Here's a sample: if you save somebody's life, they do not owe you a debt to be repaid as you might first assume; instead, you are responsible for them for the rest of their life. Why is this?