Review by Choice Review
New Yorker writer John Colapinto got interested in the voice mechanism when he damaged his own vocal cords belting out rock music. In This Is the Voice, he tells the unique story of the voice and its role in biology, linguistics, rhetoric, and psychology. Colapinto is witty, charming, clear, and erudite all at once, tacking back and forth from scientific topics to engaging accounts of the people behind the science and of actual voices, such as those of Churchill, Pavarotti, Michael Jackson, Kim Kardashian, and Beyoncé. The first half of the book covers the ontology and phylogeny of the voice and the role of the vocal apparatus in language development and evolution. The second half turns to the ways in which people use their voices socially and politically: Colapinto considers the sociolinguistics and stereotypes of dialect and accent; explores the ways in which voice is related to sex, gender, and biology; and illustrates the use of the voice as a political and an artistic tool to persuade, exhort, divide, and enrapture. This Is the Voice is engaging popular science, readable, well researched, and thought-provoking for readers of all stripes. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Edwin L. Battistella, Southern Oregon University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
New Yorker staffer Colapinto lost his chance at a career in rock 'n' roll when he could barely squeak a note. A large nodule on his vocal cords sent him into the weeds, studying all things related to voice, speech, and language. This heavily researched book discusses vocal origins and details how voice involves the physicality of lungs, diaphragm, intercostal muscles, larynx, teeth, tongue, and facial bones. Our brains also shape and color how we sound. Colapinto follows scientific language studies from Charles Darwin, Noam Chomsky, and B. F. Skinner and considers the effects of AI on speech. Other chapters discuss the dimorphism of gendered voices and how age diminishes that divide; class distinctions both affect the way people react to dialects and contribute to prejudices. In the public sphere, the voice can persuade and dissuade (think FDR and Hitler). Especially interesting is his theory of how Abraham Lincoln's high voice helped win a presidential debate. Insights on why babies vocalize before they speak words further fascinate. Lots of data, evidence, thoughtfulness, and heart here.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"The voice is a vital clue to character and personality--to fundamental identity," writes journalist Colapinto (Becoming a Neurosurgeon) in this fascinating exploration of the human voice. He begins by describing how babies are born capable of learning any of the world's 7,000 languages and argues that humans owe "our planetary dominion not to language alone, but to our special talent for turning that awesome attribute into sound." Colapinto explains fundamental aspects of the human voice, including the physiology that makes human speech possible (e.g., neural circuitry and the organs involved); how tone, pitch, and accent can have social relevance for men and women (particularly entertaining is his take on "vocal fry," a "croaky" way of speaking credited to Kim Kardashian); and, using Obama and Trump as examples, how the combined power of voice and rhetoric can persuade voters (he suggests that, in political speech, "voice" is the primary influence on voters' decision). Colapinto's narrative is chock full of information, and is something any curious-minded reader will be glad to have spent time with. Agent: Lisa Bankoff. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
After Colapinto damaged his vocal cords while singing in a rock band, his explorations into a surgical repair led him on a quest to understand how the human voice evolved and works. The voice, he discovered, was instrumental to the evolution of humans as a successful life form. He found that babies are global linguists up until about seven months old, after which they show a preference for the sounds of their native language. Parents instinctively speak at a higher pitch to young babies, using a sing-song inflection. His explorations looked at how the vocal cord dropped in the throat, enabling human speech and how a lower voice is subconsciously understood to indicate power, often in a gendered sense. He looks at how accents can indicate social class and how, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, neutral accents were chosen for broadcast journalism. Societal affectations of speech, such "vocal fry," can also indicate class or power, the author explains. He considers as well how the voices of demagogues have been used to sway populations, and concludes by noting the way the voice deteriorates with age. VERDICT A fascinating book for those interested in this amazing human capacity.--Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An expert popular science account of human speech. In his latest, New Yorker staff writer Colapinto provides an intensely researched, tightly focused, lucidly written story that is long but not too long. As the author points out, to call human speech a "miraculous feat" understates the case. All other animals "use their voices to make in-the-now proclamations about immediate survival and reproductive concerns, including expressions of fear, anger, hunger and mating urges." Evolved perhaps 200,000 years ago, human language allows us to refer to events in the past or future and to make plans that we share with others, "to build the villages, towns, cities and nations that have given us primacy over the Planet and everything on it." Even before birth, infants listen, their brains absorbing a dazzling array of tone, phonetics, syntax, patterns, and rules. Despite what early experts taught, language is not pre-installed in the brain at birth; babies learn it, usually accumulating a "mental dictionary" of 60,000 words by age 18. They achieve this because words are not random assemblages of digits. They carry meaning, and we are a species that craves meaning. Midway through the book, Colapinto moves from the mechanism of speech to its purpose. Darwin compared the changes languages undergo to natural selection, but the author disagrees. Over time, he maintains, changes in articulation, accent, and vocabulary have not increased but hobbled their efficiency, creating a Babel of incomprehensible tongues that pushes us apart. Observers claimed that the spread of media, from radio to the internet, would homogenize American speech, but the opposite occurred. Instant communication has combined with bitter ideological, economic, and cultural clashes to accelerate the creation of new American speech patterns. In the final chapter, Colapinto discusses political oratory, which has united Americans in the past. He gives high marks to the rhetoric of presidents such as Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan; however, like the majority of Americans, he considers Trump a divisive force. A rich trove of science and contemporary culture. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
