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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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