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Summary: garbage in, garbage out
Review: Anyone who has studied even a smidgen of cultural anthropology would realize that Shlain's argument carries no weight. Where are all the pre-literate societies which practice goddess worship and treat women fairly? The fact is that the inequitable treatment of women is just as much if not even more prevalent in pre-literate societies as it is in literate ones.Shlain is exploiting the naive and undeserved attention which so many people offer for no other reason than that the author has before his name those magic letters "Dr". He should reserve that title for his working life. If his ideas had been forced to stand up under their own strength then the precious resources of paper and ink which were wasted on this book might have been saved for a better purpose.
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Summary: It has made me question what I thought I knew.
Review: I was at first skeptical of the premise. But during the course of a read which was excellent in both structure and language I found myself entranced and finally convinced. And with the book's ending I continued to live in the resonance of the bardic odyssey into human action which the author somehow managed to evoke. I honestly expected another round of male-bashing but instead found a gentle almost zen-like approach to questions so subtle that I had not even noticed their existance. And it made me think about the shape and fabric of a future I had assumed I understood. I found myself arguing with the book and then questioning points I had entirely taken for granted. It was as if the author had peeled back my skull to expose my unsuspected organ of sight. I found lots I still disagree with, too. But that has stimulated me to go back and reexamine the work in process in serveral related fields. Another plus, in my view.
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Summary: Shlain's theory is quite interesting, but a bit farfetched
Review: Shlain's book made for a good read, however it seemed hard to agree with what he was writing. He spent a lot of time sifting through history to find facts (ideas) to try and prove his thesis. Should we go back to being an illiterate society so women can get higher status?
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Summary: An astonishing undertaking; a mind-engaging read
Review: What a book! Heady ideas coming from so many directions, I was reading at about half speed to be able to fully integrate and digest them... It's an enormously difficult task to step out of your culture and evaluate its effect on you. Whether every premise explored in this book can be "proven" or not is beside the point to me. Shlain has a rare gift - the courage to explore big, unanswered questions with imagination and passion. Other great reads, if you are interested in the impact of communication media on societal (and child!) development, are Neil Postman's books. His "Technopoly" is a prescient look at how technology has begun to reshape perception, values, and culture.
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Summary: A Marvelous New Idea
Review: When the enormity of Dr. Shlain's proposal hit me, I was throw back to seventh grade science class, at the moment we shared peals of riotous laughter over this new idea of floating continents. Sure, they appear to fit together like puzzle pieces, but this just enhanced the joke. Resistance to new, monumental, ideas is natural and ubiquitous. Many will attack the ancilary points while ignoring the central one. This idea that literacy has altered the basic wiring of our bicameral brains is well supported by an extensive case the author presents. Much of the historical evidence is naturally circumstantial, yet nonetheless compelling. If you enjoy intellectual excursions guided by writers like Stephen Jay Gould or Paul Davies, you are in for a treat here. The implications of Dr. Shlain's marvelous idea will make your head swim.
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Summary: Insightful; a panoramic recalculation of human history
Review: All ground breaking books are necessarily flawed. This is a function, not of the theory there promlugated but of the form which a book necessarily takes. It is linear. And limited in its scope by the dictates of the world of publishing from which is must come. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, with astonishing brevity, manages to weave the present cultural and logic based understanding of the reader into a new viewpoint, introducing and inviting that same reader to see different relationships between the historical and biological, the spiritual and the cultural dimensions of human action played out over thousands of years. The objections of Mr. Kohanski fail to convince the reader that this book does not begin a cultural dialogue of tremendous import. The outline is in place. Not all facts are represented, an impossible task. Many relevant facts, both supportative of Dr. Shlain's viewpoint and which might be refutations of that viewpoint are ignored. They might have been in the original text and been excised by the editor. That we can't know. What we can know is that this book changes the shape, temper and form of the discussion in every area. The correllaries in law, economics, sociology, anthropology and the culture in which we live, must now be hauled out and reconsidered. In addition, this book is the most beautifully written, lyrically speaking, work offered in the marketplace of non-fiction in many years. The book itself gives place and presence to a vast panorama of human history, inciting thought, introspection and delight on every page. A must read for the thoughtful and socially conscious.
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Summary: Dr. Shlain may be a good surgeon, but he is a poor historian
Review: I started this book with high hopes, intrigued by Dr. Shlain's analysis of the evolution of humans and his explanation of our physiology. However, as he delved into the historical record. I found myself more and more disappointed. He makes broad sweeping assertions without analysis, and he falls into the classic amateur historian's trap of focusing solely on events that bolster his case without even mentioning contrary evidence, nor considering whether there may be alternate explanations for the events he claims support his theory. He argues in one place that the Akkadians conquered the Sumerians, adopted their writing (cuneiform) and it was this adoption that gave rise to their patriarchialism - never considering that it may have been a patriarchal structure that enabled them to conquer Sumer in the first place. Then, to demonstrate this patriarchy, he shifts in mid-sentence and without explanation or transition from Akkad to Babylon. He casually accepts as proven facts interpretations that are even today highly controversial or that have simply been proven wrong. For example, he writes about the JEPD(R) documentary hypothesis for the development of the Hebrew Scripture without ever once conceding that it IS a hypothesis which is still controversial and undergoing revision. He quotes without question Josephus' story of Pompey visiting the Second Temple and being astonished that its sanctum sanctorum was empty; we know from Roman records that Pompey never set foot in Jerusalem. I was also nonplussed by his implication that grammar is a function of writing, not speech, an assertion casually tossed off as though he had never heard a mother correct her child's chatter. But where he finally lost me for good was in his discussion of rites of passage; while admitting that the Bible and the Talmud never once discuss the concept of a bar mitzvah, he then blithely asserts that the bar mitzvah proves that ancient Judaism valued literacy more highly than physical stamina in their young men. The bar mitzvah ceremony is at most 300 years old! Anachronistic back-dating is hardly uncommon among polemicists, but no serious historian would be so sloppy. From the evidence of his earlier chapters, Dr. Shlain knows medicine, and that is what he should stick to.
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Summary: Bravo!
Review: I have not said this in many years as I read primarily non-fiction, but "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess" was such an exciting read I could NOT put the book down! As the ending drew near, I experienced that subtle 'gut-wrench' when you know you are going to dearly miss something. You write in a most refreshing way. The reader is actually drawn into your thought processes - able to see your images and experience the journey as you traveled through Time . I cannot recall this clarity ever happening in a non-fiction book as dramatically as it shown here. I thought about this for awhile and realized that it was a book of affirmation for me- especially the later relationships which you pulled together so compellingly- flickering TV images, the Inner net (as I call it), etc. I had come to many of the same conclusions as you but it was a gift to see these ideas unfolding; so well thought out, so beautifully expressed. Your words created a ripple in my brain that just kept expanding as I moved deeper into the book. The dance through History was like standing under a cosmic waterfall, feeling the immense power of CLEANSING flow. I wanted to shout "YES!" on many a page.... I have already started "Art and Physics" which I think of fondly even when I am not immersed in it. Thank you, Leonard Shlain- the LOVE you added to that delicious string of left-brain labor certainly touched my heart as well as my mind....
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Summary: Doctor of Arts and Letters
Review: "When a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones," writes Dr. Leonard Shlain in his new book, ". . .which manifests as a decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship." Why, you may ask, would this San Francisco Bay Area surgeon be the first to figure this out? And why should the rest of us care? Blowing away the myth of surgeons as non-cognitive beings, Dr. Shlain's remarkable insights have brought widespread acclaim to his work. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, is emerging as a truly seminal contribution to our understanding of human history. Dr. Shlain's thesis is that the unique lateralization of the human brain interacted with prehistoric gender role differentiation to define the two distinctive poles of human behavior-the left brain's hunter/killer urge versus the right brain's gatherer/nurturer instinct. These, he concludes, came to define the "masculine" and "feminine" sides of human nature before written history began. His book carries this paradigm through the entirety of the human story with remarkable uniformity. What is unique about Dr. Shlain's approach is his identification of phonetic writing-the alphabet-as a marker and determinant of left brain function. Since, for example, the four sequential letters that make up the word "deer" have nothing to do with the animal itself or its visual image, an entirely new manner of thinking comes into play when one learns to read. The left brain-the world of sequence, time, numerology, and logic-then begins to dominate the mind in a way it never did before. And the right brain's world of intuition, images, feeling, and humor fades in proportion. But the left brain brings its own nasty baggage along with it-all the goal-oriented tendencies that made our male hunter/killer ancestors so successful. Acquisitiveness, cruelty, argument, and intolerance automatically rise in importance alongside literacy while the right brain's gatherer/nurturer attributes of tolerance, laughter, mysticism, and nonviolence are suppressed. As Dr. Shlain makes abundantly clear in his exhaustive tour through human history, the gender implications of the cyclic rise and fall of literacy are enormous. In image-based eras, social tolerance reigns and feminine virtues predominate. But when alphabet-based movements rise, things male ascend and misogyny flourishes. The Christian worship of Mary did not begin until the Dark Ages had decimated European literacy. And it was no coincidence that Gutenberg's innovation presaged the Inquisition, mass witch burnings, and the religious massacres of the Reformation. Unlike those incredulous historians who cannot imagine how a surgeon should have conceptualized something so important that they themselves had overlooked, I am personally not the least surprised. And I suspect that Dr. Shlain's achievement arises from more than mere observations of his patients whose right and left carotids he has reamed. The professional odyssey of a surgeon's career lurches back and forth across the corpus callosum with such ferocity that he could hardly have escaped the resulting headache any more than the rest of us. The marathon of scientific and quantitative preparation in the premedical phase of a surgeon's training takes place in a most competitive environment of numerical grade averages, MCAT's, and miscellaneous brownie points. The hunter/killer instincts of the left brain are honed against a grindstone of stress that a mastodon-hunter would have understood. One must vanquish one's own classmates to champion the quest. And then the survivor has to write an essay-with a straight face-telling the med school admissions committee how selflessly one is motivated to help one's fellow man. But on that first experience with a colicky infant and its frustrated mother, knowing the Krebs cycle somehow doesn't do it. It isn't the textbook the student clutches in panic; it's the goddess in the nurse uniform. There is a whole new sphere-nay, a hemisphere-to explore and relish. The ersatz surgeon must either find a home there or veer into a career in the laboratory. The interminable years of residency training vacillate harshly between the hand-holding of the bedside and the bloodshed of the operating room. The resident must learn to soothe fears and doubts with one lobe while impaling cancer and disease with the other. The transitions, performed without the luxury of regular sleep, must be made cleanly and graciously. (And the operating room nurse must somehow make accommodation to the fits of misogyny.) One suspects that the germ of Dr. Shlain's book was conceived within this crucible. Perhaps if he had chosen plastic surgery, Dr. Shlain would have begun his writing sooner, for no specialty is more image-based than our own. Most plastic surgeons experience a cultural sea-change upon shifting from general to plastic surgery residency. The transition from focus on "the 54-year-old gall bladder" to "the young woman with facial deformity" is a left-to-right shunt of the first order. And no other specialty displays the countenances of Roman and Egyptian goddesses on its organizations' seals. In the aesthetic surgery realm, in particular, the worship of Aphrodite parallels that portrayed in the mosaics of Pompeii. It is little wonder that aesthetic surgery faced such ostracism in the "he-man" culture of university general surgery in the first half of this century. While preoperatively sketching the marks for a lipoplasty procedure, a plastic surgeon might ponder with some bewilderment why it was necessary to go through the hazing ritual of calculus in that other world of so long ago. Some aesthetic surgeons even describe an inability to recall the names of instruments in their intensity of focus on the spatial relationships of their work-asking the nurse instead for such perceptual pseudonyms as "blue" or "cut thing" as testimony to the right brain's lack of speech. But with the television-inspired reversion to an image-based American culture over the past several decades, plastic surgery now finds itself in the mainstream both in academia and in society at large. Indeed, the visual demands of plastic surgery education continue to lift away from print media into the world of three dimensions where they rightfully belong. Perhaps the most concrete evidence of the specialty's pre-eminence as a right-brain creature is the success of its interactive video series, EF Teleplast, which continues its 14-year run despite the early demise of virtually every like attempt in the alphabet-based remainder of medicine. There may be some practical lessons that Dr. Shlain could offer us. Perhaps he might once have urged caution against reverting publicly to a left-brain defense of the breast implant lest our data-rich debate posture come across a bit misogynistic on camera. He might suggest that there is some biologic baggage lurking behind our town-gown and reconstructive-aesthetic bipolarities-conflicts that some maintenance work on our collective corpus callosum might one day bridge. The eminent Dr. Judah Folkman once stated that surgeons' minds are best suited to asking yes-no questions and answering them with laboratory data. Dr. Shlain has gone one better by telling us that there are two sides to play. We know. We've done it for years. (Reprinted with permission from Annals of Plastic Surgery 42;1999:223-224)
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Summary: The most stimulating, provocative and fascinating book.
Review: "The Alphabet..." is the most stimulating, provocative and fascinating book that I have read in my recent memory.It has repeatedly sent me to the dictionary, encyclopedia, and other sources, motivated me to make notes, and caused me to recommend it to a large and diverse collection of family, friends, and acquaintances. In my view, the circumstantial evidence marshalled in support of the author's thesis is remarkable and persuasive, even if causation is incapable of absolute proof. The depth,breadth, and clarity, as well as the erudite and delightful choice of words and phrases, makes it a "must read and continue to contemplate", irrespective of the ultimate validity of the underlying thesis. I'm part way though reading it again, and find it even more illuminating the second time.
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