A messy but profound look at the way we share information with one another.
Finnegan seeks a common origin for humanity’s disparate communication methods in this anthropological work.
Which came first: speech or writing? Though the answer may seem obvious at first—surely people must have already known how to speak before they ever wrote anything down—the author demonstrates that the resolution of that question may not actually be so clear. Anthropology has long considered the existence of a “Great Divide” between orality and literacy, with literacy representing a revolutionary leap forward. Literate cultures—or so the thinking goes—possess a fundamentally different worldview than oral ones. But where does literacy truly begin? With the invention of the alphabet? Pictograms? Cave paintings? Marks inscribed temporarily in the dirt? What is to be made of a gesture, then—a mark inscribed in the air? And where does music come in, a development that may possibly predate the emergence of speech? Finnegan, a linguist, anthropologist, and expert on orality, explores these questions in this book, a follow-up to Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Communication(2023), examining here how the basic tools people use to transmit information—the voice, the writing implement, and the musical instrument—have more in common than they initially seem. The author draws on her own fieldwork with the Limba people of Sierra Leone, whose storytelling practices incorporate visual elements that must, in a sense, be “read” to be understood. She investigates “transitional texts” whose compositions owe something to both oral and written sources, such as the Kaunitoni myth of Fiji. She explores the latent meanings of numbers and colors, since “without our really realising it, they communicate certain impressions and can influence our own (seemingly freely made) choices.” Finally, Finnegan probes the origins of “the great art,” music, and how it connects us to the animal world. She finally returns to the question that kicked it all off—whether speech is indeed an older practice than writing—and her conclusion is quite surprising.
Finnegan’s prose reads a bit like having a conversation with an enthusiastic, encyclopedic, and highly digressive older relative. “Now it started,” she says of writing, “and I think this is very moving and worth knowing in ancient Egypt. Now, in ancient Egypt, they had a hieroglyphic system, pictograms. Really complex because each concept was represented by a different glyph, hieroglyph. Well, now, this is what I think is so moving.” Though often charming, this conversational stream-of-consciousness is just as often befuddling, as are the basic historical inaccuracies that pop up from time to time, such as when the author states that Negro spirituals arose from slavery in the early 20th century. Even so, her account, which blends her firsthand research with that of others, is rarely boring, and the author manages to communicate highly technical ideas using examples clear enough for the general reader to follow. Not only are her theories about the origins of human writing surprisingly persuasive, but they also draw the reader’s attention to aspects of human communication that, in Finnegan’s hands, seem nothing short of miraculous.
A messy but profound look at the way we share information with one another.Pub Date: May 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781032799049
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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