What we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong, argues legendary storyteller and journalist Tom Wolfe. In this "whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution" (NYTimes), he takes us from Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, to the controversial work of anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans. Wolfe insists that "language, in all its forms, advanced man far beyond the boundaries of natural selection," and shows how the laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism are irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech.