
The Kingdom of Speech
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Narrated by:
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Robert Petkoff
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By:
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Tom Wolfe
About this listen
The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong.
Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech - not evolution - is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements.
From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hardwired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zigzags of Darwinism, old and neo, and finds it irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech.
©2016 Tom Wolfe (P)2016 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Dupont University: the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition....Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
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Decadence through the eyes of a ?good girl?
- By Eric on 11-18-04
By: Tom Wolfe
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Hooking Up
- By: Tom Wolfe
- Narrated by: Tom Wolfe, Ron Rifkin
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Abridged
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America's maestro reporter/novelist gives America an MRI at the dawn of a new age. Tom Wolfe scrutinizes everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers to the reasons why no one is celebrating the second American Century. Hooking Up is a chronicle of the here and now. Browse more Wolfe.
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Terrific!
- By L. Adams on 02-17-04
By: Tom Wolfe
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The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
- By: Tom Wolfe
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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"An excellent book by a genius”, said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of this now-classic exploration of the 1960s from the founder of New Journalism and author of such influential works as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe explores the style and culture of the 1960s in this dynamic collection of essays - originally stand-alone pieces, many of which were published in Esquire magazine - written in his unique, free-flowing style.
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Tom Wolfe the Astute Observor
- By J. Kinkley on 08-29-23
By: Tom Wolfe
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From Bauhaus to Our House
- By: Tom Wolfe
- Narrated by: Dennis McKee
- Length: 3 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In Tom Wolfe's hands, the strange saga of American architecture in the 20th century makes for both high comedy and intellectual excitement. This is his sequel to The Painted Word, the book that caused such a furor in the art world five years before. Once again Wolfe shows how social and intellectual fashions have determined aesthetic form in our time and how willingly the creators have abandoned personal vision and originality in order to work a la mode.
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So snarky I kept having to back up and repeat
- By Ellen on 04-08-09
By: Tom Wolfe
What listeners say about The Kingdom of Speech
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- TsundokuSensei
- 03-03-20
Rollicking takedown of Neo-Darwinism
This seems to me an unusual book: a book that aims (and succeeds) in showing that the neo-Darwinian "modern synthesis" (and all of its derivative modern incarnations) is a complete failure in explaining how humans developed speech.
Written in a style that pure Tom Wolfe and with hilariously on-point narration by Robert Petkoff, this is a short book that I found fascinating from beginning to end. I learned about Darwin conspiring with Charles Lyell to present his idea of natural selection before Alfred Russel Wallace; how Wallace later turned on the theory due to its lack of explanatory power, how Noam Chomsky lorded over the linguistics world for 5 decades and how his biggest theory of language has proven to be a house of cards. All in all, a fascinating read. Highly recommended for all those with an interest in science and/or language or for those who can't get enough Tom Wolfe!
FIVE STARS.
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- William Varner
- 03-14-17
A Book by an Atheist That Every Creationist Should Read
Darwin and Wallace; Chomsky and Everett. Two people you undoubtedly have heard of and two probably not. What these two pairs have in common and how they differ are the themes that the eloquent Tom Wolfe creatively explores in this small but powerful work. What does linguistics have to do with evolution? Much in every way say Darwin and Chomsky. "Be careful what you see" in Wallace and Everett.
You can either hate him or love him, but you should not ignore what the pugnacious Wolfe has to say about his past anti-hero Darwin and his current antagonist Chomsky.
If you ever wonder how intellectual elites rule our world, read this book. And if you want to see how contrary voices can be squashed by those elites, here are some sad examples.
I listened to this book and it was, I think, even more powerful than reading it, mainly because of Wolfe's sometimes biting prose. But read it even if you don't have Audiobooks.
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- M. Copeland
- 10-18-16
Fascinating
The narrator is amazing, made the subject that much more riveting. I have read a fair amount about Darwin, but never heard this angle. I had trouble pushing the pause button to get my stuff done! Well done.
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- Paul
- 09-29-16
Just Don't If You are Literate
What did you like best about The Kingdom of Speech? What did you like least?
It's Tom Wolfe--that answers both questions.
What did you like best about this story?
Wolfe's way with words.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
I have been a subscriber since Audible began and have never been moved to write a review. This is the worst job of pronunciation I have encountered. Please tell narrators to look up words they don't use every day. Even then, High School biology student know that Gregor Mendel's name is not pronounced like a discount store in Massapequa. As to the Latin and German, he just didn't try. I like the book but it is agony to hear.
Was The Kingdom of Speech worth the listening time?
Yes, if you can stand the narration.
Any additional comments?
Did I mention the narration.
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- et
- 05-06-24
The four hours flew by
Personal preference : listen to this audiobook before reading the myriad insightful reviews.
It's just that kinda book.
Afterwards, think it over, read the zany reviews here on audible... and enjoy the audiobook again.
P.S.
Disclosure:
I bought the audiobook.
And, (still) liked it just as much.
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- kerima gabbay
- 04-11-24
A short and excellent classic by Wolfe
Now I know what Chomsky and Darwin were up to. A great reappraisal (with meticulous investigation) of both.
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- Sarah R. Jacobs
- 01-25-18
Tom Wolfe continues to make me feel brilliant...
...and witty for the duration of any given book of his I'm reading or listening to.
His sense of the intimacy and ultimately understandably-competition-born crawls, leaps, and scurries of history's ideas and movements are convincing in that they render concrete the facts that he has quite thoroughly and with great veridical sensitivity unearthed from the landfills of information about past singular human beings.
One feels that one is there, watching a furtive and despairing Darwin sending Wallace's paper to established members of the Linnean Society, caught between the rock of his less-developed theory and the hard place of his desire to stick to the code of conduct of a gentleman.
This is a history of ideas of the sort that I love: The sort that is an initiation ceremony belonging to the mini Elusinian Mystery Cult of learning for intellectual improvement. One is guided through the narrative by the author, and, based upon the trustworthiness, convincingness, and the storyteller's spellcasting ability of the author, one is brought into a slightly different, slightly better-comprehended world than one inhabited before the final chapter displays for one the truths the author has gleaned from the ceremony/ordeal of writing the book.
For this reason, I love Tom Wolfe.
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- Thomas Gleisner
- 04-02-20
Good read
As always Tom Wolfe has great insights and an interesting look into a particular field. The ending sort of fizzles out. But it's not the destination, it's the journey
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- Kevin Hipsh
- 03-29-25
In praise of speech, but misses the point
I thought this was going to be a clever philosophical opening-up of the theory of evolution. In some ways it was. It was a very entertaining and well written history of evolutionary theory and linguistic theory, arguing for an insufficiency of evolutionary thinkers in the field like Noam Chomsky.
However, once it got to the linguistic section, where he argues that there is a dead-end in thinking about the origin of language in evolutionary terms, I feel like he started to fall flat. He felt particularly bitter against Noam Chomsky when resorting to attacking his character and political positions to support his argument for the weakness of his intellectual position.
And the final chapter, which explains the title, made me feel that he was totally out of his depth in endeavoring to write this book, because I feel that he completely missed the stakes of what people are endeavoring to do by explaining things in evolutionary terms.
Applying my X-Ray vision goggles, I think I get the sense that his deal is that he had become more conservatively aligned and pessimistic about Liberalism and “wokeness” and the decline of religion (in a Jordan Petersonian way) when writing this work, and, with not very much clarity internally, was trying to help indirectly pry open some more space for traditionalism and a useful fundamentalism.
I really think he would fit right in if he were alive today, as an “offensive” anti-woke entertainer. I must stress that, though I am woke, this book was highly listenable, with a great vocal performance, but also a very witty writing style. I just think the author invested more in style than substance, which grasped my attention long after I realized this wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
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- Wayne
- 09-01-16
Takedown of a pseudointellectual bully!
In a battle of octogenarians Tom Wolfe uses simple words to take down academic and major bully Noam Chomsky. Along the way he destroys the modern theory of how human language "evolved". That was fun! He also takes some effective shots at Charles Darwin who likely stole his theory of evolution from Alfred Russel Wallace.
The Kingdom of Speech examines the one thing, language/speech, that separates humans from all other animals. I love this little book!
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