Gifted Tongues: High school Debate and Adolescent Culture.

• Author: O'Donnell, Timothy M.
• Position: Book Review

Gifted Tongues: High School Debate and Adolescent Culture. By Gary Alan Fine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; PP. ix301. $65.00; paper $21.95.

In 1988, Michael McGough nostalgically lamented the "decline" of academic debate in an article published in The New Republic. After a two-decade absence from high school debate, McGough, who debated in the mid-1960s, returned to observe the fast-paced, jargon-laced, and hyperbole-packed activity that is debate today. Horrified and bewildered by what it had become, he hit the world of high school debate broadside, explaining that this "surreal world of abstraction," occupied by adolescent "snobs," had little educational value (17).

Although there is no way to estimate the reach of McGough's infamous attack, his scathing critique receives its answer thirteen years later from Gary Alan Fine, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, who is, himself, a former high school debater from the 1960s. As Fine writes in the introduction to his latest book, Gifted Tongues: High School Debate and Adolescent Culture, "happen[ing] upon" McGough's article in 1988 "piqued my interest" (ix). Ultimately, it led Fine, whose previous research examined adolescent culture through the lens of little league baseball and fantasy role-playing games, to spend a full year criss-crossing the state of Minnesota to observe two high school debate teams as part of his larger research project which involves understanding the "social construction of boundaries and the development of stigma and cultural deviance" (256). Gifted Tongues, the product of his in-depth foray into one particular high school debate community, is an illuminating and considered look into the world of competitive high school policy debate that reveals-all at once-the good, the bad, the peculiar, the ugly, and the truly remarkable about high school debate.

The chapters of the book cover a wide variety of topics central to understanding the contemporary debate activity both in Minnesota and around the country, including its sometimes violently discordant pockets and its highly formalized methods and idiosyncrasies. Each chapter evinces the alacrity that resides in high school debate through the generous use of testimony from the numerous debaters and coaches (whose anonymity is preserved by the careful use of pseudonyms) Fine interviewed during the course of his study. The first four chapters cover the basics of debating, including how and why...