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"Before Tom Wolfe was a bestselling novelist, he was a groundbreaking journalist. Now the maestro storyteller turns his attention to the mystery behind the creation of his own most important tool: language. In The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe makes the captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech--not evolution--is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the self-taught Englishman who beat Charles...
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Summary
A blend of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester's Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.
For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until...
Author
Summary
"Our species has been on Earth for little more than 200,000 years, just a fraction of the history of life - and yet in that short period, we have gone from a group of simple foragers to a planet-dominating force, capable of everything from art to atom bombs. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince shows how it happened. Although prevailing theory holds that a recent cognitive revolution transformed humans, Vince argues that we are the product of a unique coevolution...