An entertaining and enlightening examination of the roots of speech.
Looking at language in a new light.
Challenging conventional theories on the origin of language, Australian scholar Beekman begins by exploring the evolution of humans, discussing the work and theories of Charles Darwin, Stephen J. Gould, and other evolutionary biologists. Of particular interest to the author is bipedalism. “It all started with walking upright,” she says. However, she contends, no longer living in trees created a “childcare problem.” The author considers other evolutionary changes, including shifts in the birth canal, increased brain size, and shorter gestation periods. The author then turns to the origin of language, calling the views of psychologist and behaviorist Burrhus Frederic Skinner and linguist Noam Chomsky “half right.” The author writes, “Our ability to speak was the result of a short series of genetic and anatomic flukes that set the stage for runaway selection.” Further, she argues, “Perhaps linguists are looking at language the wrong way.” Rather than searching for a language-acquisition device, the author proposes that language should be viewed as “more akin to a virus. A language that spreads easily from brain to brain is more likely to stick around. Because language depends on language learners—children—language must be tuned to the brain of children….If all of humanity went extinct, so would all the languages of the world. The opposite is not the case, although humanity is likely to change in the absence of language.” Interestingly, Beekman fears that modern society could hinder our acquisition of language. “The nuclear family goes against our nature,” she writes. “We are the most social species of all mammals….We can’t stand being alone.” If we live in isolation, she writes, “there is a danger we are losing something precious. Something uniquely human. The perfect conditions to learn language.”
An entertaining and enlightening examination of the roots of speech.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781668066058
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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