"A rich and wide-ranging book, a ’tour-de-force’ as one of the enthusiastic readers on the back cover puts it, and the fruit of forty-odd years’ experience and continuing openness to new ideas. . . . I believe The Oral and Beyond should become a key text for students in different disciplines, not least because of Ruth Finnegan’s ability to synthesise relevant scholarship in a notably easy and jargon-free style and to situate it in time and place."

Elizabeth Tonkin | Oral History

"[The author] explores how humans, not just in Africa but across the globe, use words to talk of their environments and situations, and also to link their past and present, a linkage that shows the interrelatedness of peoples in time and space. . . .The objectivity with which she attacks issues in this work makes it an invaluable resource for linguists, anthropologists, students of comparative literature, and all students of culture."

Abdulai Salifu | Journal of Folklore Research

"This is not an easy work to absorb, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. It is especially valuable to historians for its likely sobering effect, but for others as well it is a state of the art valediction by one of the field’s pre-eminent exponents."

David Henige | African Studies Review