This is the first Tom Wolfe book I've read and I quite enjoyed the frenetic style. I was amused by how much fun Tom seemed to be having on the page. It more than once reminded me of the style Horrible Histories use in their books.

He obviously tries to fit history into interesting narratives, so go into this looking for a light, fun treatment of the material. It's well-researched but doesn't shy away from bestowing real people with exaggerated personas (the most common one being the David-Goliath dynamic) in service of a dramatic narrative.

The only real complaint I have from this otherwise highly enjoyable book is that, towards the end, it feels rushed. The Darwin-Wallace is given the deepest treatment when its only job is to set background for the actual theme of the language debate. When we get to the language question, we're fed a binary David-Goliath narrative that isn't fleshed out as well as the chapters on Darwin. And the last ten pages, which had the potential to be the most interesting because that's when Speech-with-a-capital-S is introduced (alongwith the provocative statement "Language is Mnemonics"), are just disappointingly unsupported by any of the credible footnotes that held up the previous pages. It foreshadows something cool is coming, like maybe, language is neither universal nor an artifact. But that insight is never delivered, and we're stuck with a ten-page sermon on the importance of speech. It seemed like Tom worked his butt off on Darwin, read up on Chomsky, Universal Grammar, Everett, but prematurely abandoned the project when he reached the meat of the book, namely speech.

Still, enjoyable light-reading. ( )

Wolfe's final book is a veritable tour de force. ( )

Mr. Wolfe does an excellent literary takedown of Charles Darwin and uses the second part of the book to take down Noam Chomsky. Arguments are entertainingly expressed and well documented. ( )

A majority of this book is published in Harpers Magazine (this book tops out at about 150 pages). As someone who studied linguistics, specifically Chomskian linguistics, it was, surprising, jolting. Chomsky is in his 90s now if he's a day, and the desperation in which he spoke with Tom Wolfe about the pushback against his work, his life's work, is agonizing, as someone who sparked my love affair with language and with how we have created this monster that drives the world, his frailty frightens me, his cold dismissal that once excited me when leveled against political foes, now is aimed at everyone, is heartbreaking. I haven't studied linguistics in years. I'm thinking I'm going to have to start reading linguisitcs texts again because this book actually caused me physical pain. What do they say? Kill your darlings, kill your idols. Chomsky, no matter happens to his law of recursion, his universal grammar, is already in the patheon of immortals. 2016 has already cost me a lot in public figure deaths, and I'm not saying Chomsky is going to be one of them. But I'm watching him more intensly now than I have in many years. I don't even like fucking Tom Wolfe. But I'm calling this essential reading for anyone who cares about language and how language and speech got here, despite Wolfe's bizarrly smarmy, overly intellectual spewage, which I have no idea if Chomsky and Wolfe hate each other, but there is something really unduly vicious about the way he talks about Chomsky. Maybe not. Maybe it's time that someone took a sword to Chomsky and his words. We'll see. Read The Kingdom of Speech and think on your words carefully. ( )

The one purely positive thing to be said about The Kingdom of Speech is that it really is a rather engrossing and entertaining read. It has a certain dynamism to it and and a very expressive style that is quite absorbing. It is easily read in one quick sitting and certainly doesn't commit the cardinal sin of being boring. That fact, however, says very little about the quality of both the form and substance of the book, which are rather questionable, to put it mildly. We will therefore proceed to question them.

Let us begin with the writing style.

The most glaringly annoying and supremely unnecessary part of Wolfe's style is the excessive... use... of... ellipses... It is so distracting! There is simply no good reason to interrupt the flow of prose with ellipses when full stops, commas or semi-colons do the job perfectly well. The ellipsis has a certain limited function in writing, but it is limited for a reason. It can produce an interesting and deliberate effect once in a while, as in pages 4-5, where it is supposed to illustrate a jumbled train of thought as Wolfe considers an article by Chomsky et al. and draws the conclusion that since Darwin, "linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline [have] discovered... nothing...about language". (p.5) But even when the use of ellipsis is deliberate (putting aside the patent untruthfulness of the above-quoted statement), it comes off as annoying and disruptive. What is, however, simply inexcusable, is the use of 1-2 ellipses on almost every single page, often for no (apparent) stylistic reason.

Otherwise, the style is flashy and overly rambling. Wolfe often restates his point far too many times, like for example the different mnemonic examples (p.161-162) and digresses into strange and unrelated aspects of the narrative, for example recounting personal anecdotes and not linguistic arguments from Everett's book. The attempt to create a parallel between Darwin/Wallace and Chomsky/Everett also seemed a little bit strained and introduced some unnecessary bias.

The case that Wolfe is trying to make (and that Everett has supposedly vindicated) is this: "language is an artifact, shaped by culture". How this conclusion is reached is incredibly unclear. Okay, Piraha proved recursion theory and some other aspects of the innate-language orthodoxy wrong. That I understood, and an important point was made about dogmatic attitudes and the danger of ego in science. It is fascinating how a single discovery can overturn so much scientific consensus. But Piraha and artifact-language theory only raise more questions than Wolfe ever attempts to answer. Even if language is an artifact, the question of how that artifact was constructed (rather than evolved) still remains. Pooh-pooh or bow-wow theories are still relevant, since it is unclear exactly how humans constructed languages even as simple (and complex) as Piraha. Language is shaped by culture, okay, but isn't culture also shaped by language? How do they interact? This is a chicken-and-egg question very relevant to the debate, but Wolfe nowhere even acknowledges it.

Furthermore, Wolfe dismisses all Chomskyan thought as pie-in-the-sky theorizing, without every engaging with actual arguments AND research that might support innate language paradigms. It is true that Chomsky et al. often rely on theory rather than empiricism, but that doesn't change the fact that there are observations and research that seem to support innate language. The one counter-argument that Wolfe does note - that Piraha speakers easily learn a very different language, Portuguese, raises some interesting questions. Obviously Piraha speakers have full mental capabilities, but their cultural structure doesn't require language innovation, or perhaps their language inhibits cultural innovation... who knows? Wolfe is a good PR-spokesman for Everett, whose books do seem quite interesting and probably do tackle these questions in a serious manner. Also, even if language is an artifact that has enabled all of human civilization, how did humans gain the capacity for such creativity? And we are back to evolutionary questions.

Tom Wolfe is more interested in linguistics as a story, rather than as a field of study. He wants to deflate Chomsky and Darwin and vindicate the underdogs more than he actually wants to understand anything about language. This book is good for some historical background behind The Origin of Species and certain developments in linguistics (although he does overestimate Chomsky's influence), but ultimately it is not greatly informative. It tries to reach conclusions but only raises questions and muddies the waters - not necessarily a bad thing, but Wolfe is overly ambitious and overly certain of his premise compared to the actual evidence he provides. The book suffers from an author who is obviously a stranger to the field of both linguistics and evolutionary biology, often making factually inaccurate statements and misunderstanding concepts. I would probably not recommend The Kingdom of Speech , but I might look into Dan Everett's book for a more satisfying approach to this new language-as-artifact paradigm. ( )