Read The Kingdom of Speech for Free Online Page A

down-lighter-lit, Wi-Fi-wired, flat-screen-the-size-of-Colorado’d, two-basin-bathroomed, debouched-silk-draped, combination-safed, School-of-David-Hicks-carpeted, Bose-Sound-systematic, German-brass-fixture-showered hotels…full of God knows how many humans who expect at least that much for their $750 per night and up…and in the distance the peaks of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Citicorp Building, and the very tip of the top of the new Freedom Tower…and in between, a steel field of towers 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 stories high.
    It occurred to me that the two bedtime scenes, Apeland’s on the one hand and Manhattan’s on the other, were a perfect graph of what speech hath wrought. Speech! To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David . Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.
    a  According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the word “primitive” can be defined as: “of, belonging to, or seeming to come from an early time in the very ancient past; not having a written language, advanced technology, etc.;…of, relating to, or produced by a people or culture that is nonindustrial and often nonliterate and tribal.”

Also by Tom Wolfe
    The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
    The Pump House Gang
    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
    Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
    The Painted Word
    Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
    The Right Stuff
    In Our Time
    From Bauhaus to Our House
    The Purple Decades
    The Bonfire of the Vanities
    A Man in Full
    Hooking Up
    I Am Charlotte Simmons
    Back to Blood

Copyright © 2016 by Tom Wolfe
Cover design by Keith Hayes
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Author photograph by Mark Seliger
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    First ebook edition: August 2016
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    ISBN 978-0-316-40464-8
    E3-20160719-DA-NF