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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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