Rating: 
Summary: Uninformed
Review: This is a book written by an author who seems to be very much out of his element. He begins with a lengthy discussion of Chinese characters, which is logical enough, except that he really doesn't have even a basic understanding of them. Much of what he says about Chinese characters is fundamentally misinformed. He argues that Chinese characters persisted because of the "conservative" nature of Chinese culture, when in fact this form of writing persisted because it is very well suited to the nature of the Chinese language. This undermines some of the succeeding points he tries to make about writing, where he argues that hieroglyphic writing persisted because of the "conservative" nature of Egyptian culture.
He includes a brief and pointless chapter about memes, in which he fails to make clear why he is even discussing it. It strikes me as filler.
He does include a fair amount of Mediterranean history, which is reasonable, but he scatters it among the information he is presenting about the alphabet. The result is that it is hard to follow the relationship between historical events and the development of the alphabet. This material comes across as insufficiently considered. There certainly is a fascinating story buried here, but Man fails to dig it up, dust it off, and show it to us.
Finally, I would say that Man fails to deliver on the title. The focus of the book is the development of the alphabet, rather than how the alphabet changed the world.
Rating: 
Summary: Neither style nor substance as easy as ABC!
Review: You would be hard pressed not to agree with other reviewers who seem near unanimous in their sense of frustration with the author's meandering style which unfortunately obscures some interesting points. Instead of holding up and walking us through a clear thesis, the author continually digresses into various minutiae about ancient Mediterranean history, archaeology, and linguistics, coupled with an awkardly placed chapter, two-thirds into the book, compariong and contrasting the dynamics of biological and cultural evolution.This being said, I feel it only fair to tell you what the book attempts to convey. John Mann sees the alphabet (by which he really means the modern Roman alphabet used widely in western civilizations) as a peculiar artifact of human invention and whose origin and spread were hardly accidental. According to him, the evolution of the alphabet was shaped by dynamics similar to those which cause heridity, variation, and selection of genetic traits among species. His foil is the work of Yale classics scholar Eric Havelock whom Mann characterizes as holding up the ancient Greek alphabet as the paragon of literary perfection and the underpinning of Greek genius. Mann then proceeds to dismantle this image of the ancient Greek alphabet, showing the debt the Greeks owed to older civlizations, notably the Phoenicians, through a complex process of evolution initally shaped by the needs of recording trade transactions in a mechanism more efficient than Egyptian hieroglyhpics or Sumerican cuneiform, and later by the needs of an emerging culture (the Hebrews) whose ideology required literacy under a strogn charismatic leader (Moses). It would be neither fair nor accurate to represent John Mann's arguments on the origins of the alphabet as based on biblical claims. In fact, he is cautious to point out the such claims are generally not substianted by available evidence, much of which however was gathered by archaeological expeditions exploring such claims. Unfortunately, the discussion of this topic is too full of digression from the book's purported central thesis to be worthy of the few interesting insights it does bring. Having described the archaeological finds around the "Asiatic" script which was contemporary with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mann shows links between this script and that developed in the mysterious eastern Mediterranean state of the second millenium known from Egyptian sources as Ugarit, one of several~~ rival Phoenician ports of that ancient period. Again, the central thesis in the book gets lost amidst a welter of minutiae, albeit not uninteresting, about this civlization. In the next step towards completing the jigsaw puzzle he presents, Mann shows the links between the Phoenicians who had their alphabet around 1200 BC and the ancient Greeks whose early alphabet is not evidenced till 800 BC. But before leaping into this discussion, Mann inserts the seventh chapter of the book whose title "The Selfish Alphabet" takes off from biologist Richard Dawkins' book "The Selfish Gene" and in which he develops a curious argument about the evolution of cultural artifacts as language and religion which he likens to the so-called memes, the famous term that Dawkins coined in his 1976 book. Mann admits his own struggle in seeking his "Grand Unified Theory of Culture" and does humbly invite the uniterested reader to proceed to the next chapter where he continues his exposition on the transmission of the alphabetic tradition from the Phoenicians to the Greeks. Lest you think that Mann has a narrow focus on Western civilization, you might be interested to discover his special interest in Mongolian culture and history. In fact, his fifth chapter provides an absoluting fascinating account of the development in fifteenth century Korea of an alphabet which Mann, quoting British linguist Geoffrey Sampson, describes as QUOTE one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind UNQUOTE With this chapter,in which he shows this Korean script drew from the Mongols, Mann tries to butress what seemed to me to be one of his key points: that the invention of the alphabet was a rare intellectual achievement whose impact was independent of technology and which has linked many civilizations. Referring to the thirteenth century adoption by Mongolian leader Chingis Khan of the alphabet of the Naiman people he had conquered, Mann proclaims grandly QUOTE He [Chingis Khan] ordered his staff to adopt the script of the newly conquered Naiman tribe, who wrote taking a system from the Uighurs, who inherited ot from an Iranian culture, Sogdian, who had taken it over from Aramaic, who had it from old Hebrew: in effect, the script familiar to the Israelites 3000 years earlier UNQUOTE Full circle back to his argument on the origins of the alphabet. The appendices provide some interesting set of transliterations across different alphabets, a historical timeline, and a fairly extensive biobliography. I was truly sorry to find this intriguing book handicapped by its cumbersome style, let alone some likely questions about the scholarship.
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