Tom Wolfe
8pm
The Kingdom of Speech
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$43 General Admission Section Seating + Wolfe’s book
$53 Reserved Section seat + Wolfe’s book
Tom Wolfe is the the author of more than a dozen books, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. His 1965 book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby established him as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as New Journalism. He received the National Book Foundation’s Medal in 2010 for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In November 2012, The New York Public Library paid $2.1 million for his papers.
“Wolfe …changed the balance of power between writers of fiction and writers of nonfiction..their willingness to submerge themselves in their subjects, and to steal from the novelist’s bag of tricks: scene-by-scene construction, use of dramatic dialogue, vivid characterization, shifting points of view, and so on.” —Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
Tom Wolfe takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech–not evolution–is responsible for humanity’s complex societies and achievements.
From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech.
