An approachable yet impressively rigorous study of various forms of language.
Finnegan, an academic linguist, argues for a more expansive interpretation of communication.
Proponents of the dominant theories of human discourse, the author observes, tend to see its development as a “one-way ladder” that ascends from primitive to increasingly more sophisticated forms, culminating in speech. This interpretative approach, often “logocentric” (focused on words as communication) and “unidimensional,” overly privileges Western civilization as a paradigm of communication, but it also neglects the full richness of communication, which the author defines as the “purposive, organised and mutually recognisable process in which individuals actively interconnect with each other.” This more inclusive understanding not only focuses on verbal speech, or on the conveyance of information, but also on interconnection provided by all the senses. Communication thus may be emancipated from verbal text, she asserts. Finnegan then explores, with great subtlety and insight, the multifarious expressions of communication in dance and rituals—to name only two of the communication methods she discusses. The author also discusses what she admits is the “deeply contentious area” of paranormal encounters and extrasensory communication. Throughout, Finnegan doesn’t treat communicative modalities as distinct from the social conditions from which they arise; instead, she shows how they’re mediated by cultural context. Ultimately, her view of communication is so convincingly broad that she’s able to emphasize the “human-animal continuity,” in which other species connect in remarkably complex ways, and how this idea can be used to illuminate human means of interconnection. The author aims for a popularly accessible study that avoids an overly granular survey of the academic literature; the result is an engaging, straightforward work likely to appeal to the curious nonprofessional—one that’s free of turgid jargon, but still intellectually exacting. Finnegan doesn’t ignore the more traditional elements of communication, nor does she neglect to acknowledge the “predominantly audiovisual” orientation of humans. She offers a challenging counterpoint to theories that reduce such communication to their cognitive or evolutionary parts, instead sketching a theory of far greater depth.
An approachable yet impressively rigorous study of various forms of language.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2023
ISBN: 9781032490397
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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BOOK REVIEW
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