Tom Wolfe Takes on Darwin and Noam Chomsky!

I read Tom Wolfe's new non-fiction book, The Kingdom of Speech, over the holiday weekend. A short but immensely entertaining and provocative volume. Wolfe spends half the book eviscerating Noam Chomsky, drawing on recent research by young linguists and anthropologists to toppple the Chomskyite notions of a "Universal Grammar" and an "LAD" (Language Acquisition Device), supposedly hardwired in the brain. Along the way Wolfe demolishes Chomsky's anarchist politics, which he sees as a sentimental hangover from Chomsky's roots in the East European shtetl as well as his boyhood crush on the Spanish anarchists who briefly took over Barcelona in the late 1930s. This contoversial book is going to upset a lot of people -- neo-Darwinists, orthodox Chomskyites, and much of the cultural and scientific establishment. But most of all it is a paean to the powers of human speech, which Wolfe sees as the most powerful and defining creation of the human race. In short, a delightful and highly stimulating way to spend Labor Day weekend. To say more would ruin your own reading pleasure.

Photo by Mark Seliger.