Book Review: Finding Our Tongues by Dean Falk

Book: Finding Our Tongues
Author(s): Dean Falk
Read: January 2011
**All reviews I write may contain spoilers, read at your own discretion**


Having received this as a Christmas gift, I had no incoming expectations from this book. It discusses the acquisition of human language beginning with our ancestors, homo erectus, and paralelling it with the other primates' lack of any kind of verbal language. Although the author presents a very interesting view to the field of language and speech, it seems as though the book itself is largely based on repetition. I spent a lot of time reading what felt like the same pieces of information over and over again. Pieces of information that didn't even feel like they were the main goal or focus of the passage or Chapter they were in. The book is full of interesting ideas with very little research or founding to back them up. I was interested in the author's aside, commenting that hominid mothers tended to carry their babies in their left arms, keeping them close to their heartbeat which in turn could have been the precedent for right-handedness.
In the end this book did not capture my interests enough to keep me reading. After forcing myself halfway through, I gave up. The repetitive nature of the information and its lack of a solid foundation really turned me off.