Tom Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom of Speech has started a row that promises to be the literary spat of the season
The arcane study of language has a new literary entrant: the famed New Journalism author Tom Wolfe. Never one to back away from a fight, Wolfe, 85, has picked two disputes in his new book, The Kingdom of Speech – one with Charles Darwin and a second with linguist Noam Chomsky, 87, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Skirmishes broke out over the summer and look set to continue. Wolfe takes on Darwin’s theory of evolution – “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place”. He also assails Chomsky’s central theory that babies are born with a language organ that produces, in effect, a “universal grammar” which could explain why children are able to speak so early.
Related: The 100 best nonfiction books: No 7 – The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)
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