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Summary
Summary
The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong.
Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech -- not evolution -- is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements.
From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech.
Author Notes
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia on March 2, 1930. He received bachelor's degree in English from Washington and Lee University in 1951 and a Ph.D in American studies from Yale University in 1957. He started his journalism career as a general-assignment reporter at The Springfield Union. While he was working for The Washington Post, he was assigned to cover Latin America and won the Washington Newspaper Guild's foreign news prize for a series on Cuba in 1961. In 1962, he became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and a staff writer for New York magazine. His work also appeared in Harper's and Esquire.
His first book, a collection of articles about the flamboyant Sixties written for New York and Esquire entitled The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, was published in 1968. His other collections included Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and Hooking Up. His non-fiction works included The Pump House Gang; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; The Painted Word; Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine; In Our Time; and From Bauhaus to Our House. The Right Stuff won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award. It was adapted into a film in 1983.
His fiction books included The Bonfire of the Vanities, Ambush at Fort Bragg, A Man in Full, The Kingdom of Speech, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Back to Blood. He was also a contributing artist at Harper's from 1978 to 1981. Many of his illustrations were collected in In Our Time. He died on May 14, 2018 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Wolfe (Back to Blood), who began his career as a journalist, delivers his first nonfiction book in 16 years. In lively, irreverent, and witty prose, he argues that speech, not evolution, sets humans apart from animals and is responsible for all of humankind's complex achievements. Speech, Wolfe explains, was the "first artifact," the first instance where people took elements from nature-sounds-and turned them into something completely constructed. Wolfe evaluates the theories of the early evolutionists, such as Charles Darwin; self-taught British naturalist Alfred Wallace; and present-day linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists who, despite 150 years of effort, still struggle to understand how language evolved. Zeroing in on two scientific rivalries that pit an outsider against the establishment, Wolfe slyly skewers Darwin for grabbing all the glory from Wallace for the theory of evolution, and Noam Chomsky for ignoring, yet later tacitly acknowledging, fellow linguist Daniel Everett, who disagreed with Chomsky's theory that language, in all its complexity, is hardwired in humans. Everett spent 30 years studying the Pirahas, an isolated tribe in the Amazon basin, whose language revealed no conception of past or future, and no comprehension of numbers. Wolfe is at his best when portraying the lives of the scientists and their respective eras, and his vibrant study manages to be clever, funny, serious, satirical, and instructive. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The celebrated author challenges Darwin and Chomsky on the origin of human language in an irresponsibly partial account, riddled with falsehoods What separates us from the other animals? The list of proposed answers is as long as your arm: rationality; cooking; religion; pointless games; making stuff; and so forth. But one popular answer has always been our power of language. The exact process by which we acquired it is mysterious. So here is Tom Wolfe to tell us why everyone to date has got it wrong. The book tells the story of two little guys up against two establishment bullies. The hard-grafting Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently co-discovered the principle of evolution by natural selection, didn't stand a chance against Charles Darwin, who enjoyed "the eternally Daddy-paid-for life of a British Gentleman". Darwin imagined his theory could explain everything, but Wallace eventually decided that it couldn't explain language, which must after all have been God-given. A century later comes Noam Chomsky, revolutionising linguistics by suggesting that humans have an innate (therefore evolved) capacity to acquire languages: a built-in "deep grammar" or "universal grammar" or "language acquisition device" which explains, for example, how toddlers can easily construct novel well-formed sentences. (See also Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct.) "Nothing about Chomsky's charisma was elegant," Wolfe complains, perhaps wishing the object of his abuse had worn a white suit, and yet, he says, Chomsky ruthlessly dominated the field. Until, that is, a plucky, outdoorsy underdog called Daniel Everett spent some time with an Amazon tribe called the Piraha and reported that their language lacks a certain feature (recursion, or nesting of ideas) that Chomsky had suggested might be universal, and so proved Chomsky wrong. The smoke cleared and the origin of language remained as elusive as ever. Wolfe tells these stories with the kind of free-wheeling vim familiar from his brilliant books such as The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Particularly in the way he ventriloquises the thoughts and worries of his protagonists, the book is superbly written, when it doesn't tip over into a kind of self-parodic babble. (Darwin, we are assured, "was also a slick operator ... smooth ... smooth ... smooth and then some".) The only problem with Wolfe's tales, really, is that they are irresponsibly partial accounts, riddled with elementary falsehoods. Wolfe insists, for example, that Darwin had no "evidence" for his theory of evolution by natural selection; in fact, as is well known, he adduced a lot of evidence at the time, including the geographical distribution of species, comparative anatomy, fossils and the existence of vestigial organs. Today, of course, evolution is observed in real time in the laboratory, among microbes or insects, a fact that Wolfe either doesn't know or is mysteriously careful not to mention. Meanwhile, the argument between Chomsky and Everett is much more controversial than he allows. (Others point out that even if the Piraha have no recursion in their language, which some deny, they are easily able to learn Portuguese, which does have it.) And in any case, some version, at least, of the idea of a "language centre" in the brain is now uncontroversial -- not in the sense of a uniquely dedicated physical sub-organ, because that is not how the brain works, but certainly in the form of specialised neuronal "circuits" that are predictably active during language processing. Wolfe tells his stories with the kind of free-wheeling vim familiar from The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities The Kingdom of Speech, then, is a sad example of the interface of literary celebrity with publishing. An author less famous and bankable than Wolfe would surely have been saved from such embarrassment by more critical editorial attention. Even a cursory fact-check could still have prevented howlers such as the statement that "Einstein discovered the speed of light" (no he didn't), or that DNA is "the so-called building blocks genes are made of" (it's the other way round). Wolfe has insisted that he is an atheist rather than a creationist (though this book has of course been welcomed with open arms by the creationist American "intelligent design" movement), and we may as well take him at his word. He is not making a crypto-religious argument; he just hasn't researched his subject properly. Never mind facts. The USP of this book, finally, is that Wolfe himself, just by thinking about it a bit, has single-handedly solved the problem that "has left endless generations of academics, certified geniuses, utterly baffled". He alone knows how language arose. Darwin's own guesses -- the imitation of animal sounds, for example -- were, Wolfe scornfully writes, just that: guesses, or "Just So stories". But Wolfe has the one true answer. What is it? Er, that humans invented language as a mnemonic device, to help remember things. (He doesn't explain this very clearly, but I think I was supposed to imagine a caveman trying to remember to bring another rock indoors and grunting "Rock!" as an aide-memoire.) This, of course, is no better a Just So story than any of Darwin's. As it happens, though Wolfe doesn't mention it, the ancient Epicureans already thought much the same thing, considering that animals "labelled" parts of the world with particular honks and squawks, and humans just developed the habit further. But now we know what the Epicureans didn't and Wolfe still apparently doesn't: that the brain is an evolved organ, or that the human larynx evolved into a shape very different from the larynxes of our closest primate cousins, enabling us to make speech-noises they can't. We still don't know precisely how it happened and may never do, but it is obvious to everyone that speech must have evolved -- to everyone, that is, except those who are congenitally suspicious of scientific authority, and perhaps especially those professional super-users of language who feel forlorn at the prospect of their life-defining power being demystified by geeks. - Steven Poole.
Booklist Review
Over the course of his long, intrepid, and influential writing life, Wolfe has become best known for his big, brash novels of eviscerating social critique, most recently Back to Blood (2012). But he made his name writing facade-busting nonfiction, and now, after a 16-year hiatus, he returns to true stories, all riled up about eight heavy-weight Evolutionists who threw in the towel, giving up on the effort to determine the origin of speech and how it works. Speech, Wolfe declares, is the attribute of all attributes when it comes to what differentiates humankind from all the other animals on Earth, so why have we failed to understand our world-altering linguistic capability? In this mettlesome, slyly funny takedown, Wolfe spotlights two key scientific rivalries, each pitting a scrappy outsider against the academy: the naturalist Alfred Wallace versus Charles Darwin, and, in our time, the missionary-turned-linguist Daniel L. Everett and his battle with the long-reigning Noam Chomsky. Wolfe's pithy and stirring play-by-play coverage of compelling lives and demanding science transforms our perception of speech, which, he asserts, will soon be recognized as the Fourth Kingdom of Earth. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: As always, the white-suited Wolfe will be all over the media, traditional and online, stirring things up and sending readers to the shelves.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE KINGDOM OF SPEECH, by Tom Wolfe. (Back Bay/ Little, Brown, $15.99.) With his signature wit, Wolfe takes aim at evolution - or, as he sees it, a messy guess - baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place." Language, in his view, is not a logical byproduct of evolution but a tool that humans invented. The book also serves as a searing dismissal of academia, and of the linguistics professor Noam Chomsky.
Library Journal Review
With his first work of nonfiction in 16 years, Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; The Bonfire of the Vanities) is back with a bang, arguing that speech is the cornerstone of society's greatest accomplishments. Meticulously deconstructing Darwinism, Wolfe exposes the flaws in the theory of evolution, which was eventually rejected by its original forgotten founder, and shatters the gentlemanly image of its namesake. Transitioning seamlessly into the land of linguistics, the author then elegantly strips apart the concept that humans were born with a "language organ." Examining the controversial field research of Daniel Everett, Wolfe shows how persistence can pay off when confronting stubborn, outdated concepts authorized and endorsed by the establishment. With his usual sharp wit and style, Wolfe's return to his roots is a thrilling journey into the who, what, where, when, why, and how of speech that will undoubtedly provoke stimulating conversations. VERDICT Not just for linguistics students or fans of the famous father of new journalism, this slim, spirited volume makes a worthy addition to any collection. [See Prepub Alert, 2/21/16.]-Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.