The Strange Tools of Human Communication:
The Voice, The Pen, and The Lyre

Review from Thomas Anderson, Editor In Chief, Literary Titan

Ruth Finnegan’s The Strange Tools of Human Communication is a wide-ranging and often unexpectedly intimate meditation on how human beings make meaning through more than language alone. Moving from the voice to writing, music, gesture, number, colour, and finally the hand itself, Finnegan argues that communication is not a single channel but a dense, historical, bodily weave. What stayed with me most was the book’s refusal to let speech monopolize the story of human expressiveness. The chapters on Limba storytelling in Sierra Leone, on pictographic systems and cave art, on music’s possible origins, and on those half-conscious forms of signifying that live in numbers and colours all feed into one large claim: we are tool-making communicators, and our tools are stranger, older, and more various than modern habits of thought usually allow.

      What I admired most was the book’s atmosphere of intelligent wonder. Finnegan writes like a scholar who still feels genuine astonishment at her subject, and that astonishment is contagious. I was especially taken by the pages on voice, where she moves from the physical instrument of the larynx to the felt power of hearing poetry aloud, and then into her vivid account of Limba oral performance, with its repetitions, pauses, chorus responses, and the sly drama of “the clever cat.” Those sections have real life in them. They don’t just describe communication, they seem to perform its vitality. I also liked the book’s impatience with easy hierarchies. Her defense of pictograms and non-alphabetic systems, and her skepticism toward grand claims that writing alone transformed humanity, give the argument a welcome steadiness.

      At the same time, I found the book more persuasive in its concrete chapters than in its more speculative ones, and that imbalance is part of what makes it feel human rather than mechanically “complete.” When Finnegan is close to lived example, to oral artistry, to scripts and inscriptions, to music as a social and emotional practice, I felt entirely in her hands. When she moves into swarming, unconscious intercommunication, or the more mystical reaches of shared consciousness, I was intrigued. Still, even there, I never felt she was being careless. What she offers is less a hard thesis than a roaming, seasoned intelligence thinking aloud across disciplines. The book has the texture of a learned person laying out a lifetime’s thinking, with all the warmth, digression, and oddity that implies.

      I found this a stimulating book that enlarges the reader’s sense of what communication is and where it lives. I finished it feeling more alert to sound, script, gesture, ritual, and the patient labor of the hand. I’d recommend it most strongly to readers of anthropology, linguistics, music, oral tradition, and cultural history, and also to anyone who likes scholarship with personality still beating inside it. This is a thoughtful book for curious readers who don’t mind following an original mind down winding paths.