Dennis Sewell
Words to the Wise
The Kingdom of Speech
By Tom Wolfe
Jonathan Cape 185pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
A decade ago Tom Wolfe delivered the Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities. His talk was called ‘The Human Beast’ and much of it consisted of an assertion that around 11,000 years ago speech took over from evolution the job of shaping the human future. It was the faculty of speech, Wolfe argued, that brought forth religion, farming and everything else that constitutes human exceptionalism and gives our species dominion over nature. For all really important human activities, verily in the beginning was the word.
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