The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

I've just finished The First Word - and I must say, for a book about language, Christine Kenneally is oddly verbose.

This is an interesting, if unusually shaped, study: Kenneally begins with an overview of major thinkers in the field of linguistic theory (Chomsky, among them), then proceeds to survey associated developments in the areas of biology and zoology. Part of the difficulty with this work, however, is that Kenneally fails to present her own findings - and thus her book ends up reading as an homage, of sorts, to Chomsky, Steven Pinker, and Paul Bloom.

I had the sense by the end of my reading that Kenneally is herself unclear whether the development of language is best understood within the realm of philosophy or biology (perhaps it's both). Don't get me wrong, the genesis of spoken language is an endlessly engaging topic (and at points Kenneally highlights this fact), it's just that The First Word, in its unyielding verbosity, never quite unmasks that quirky thing today labeled "linguistic evolution."