The Kingdom of Speech

The legendary reporter and author of The Right Stuff takes on Darwin, Chomsky, and the origin of language in his boldest bit of dueling yet (The New York Times). Tom Wolfe, the great journalist-provocateur, aims his piercing wit at the presiding theories of what makes us human. 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.