SPEECH!
Subtitle: How Language Made Us Human
Publisher: Hogsaloft; hogsaloft
Published: 2021
Number of pages: 303
Description: What makes us human? Why are we the only animals who wear clothes, drive cars, trawl the internet, and fly helicopters on Mars? It’s all because we’ve learnt to talk: yet remarkably, we still don’t know how we did it. SPEECH! suggests an answer that’s been hiding in plain sight – the simple yet radical shift that turned our analog grunts and shrieks into words. But its consequences are far from simple: being able to share ideas through language was an evolutionary tipping point – it allowed us to link up our minds. SPEECH! traces our roller-coaster ride with language from hunter-gatherer to urban hipster: the epic tale of the struggle for knowledge against the false gods of culture, religion and identity – as we teeter toward a destination we may still resist, but ultimately cannot escape.