Rating: 
Summary: This is an extraordinary idea
Review: This grand book is novel in its concept and accessible in its content. I have not found in years a set of notions that have fired the book community around me as this book has. Literacy has the aura of such necessity and legitimacy that few have ever questioned the dark side. To span as much time as is covered in this book is a daunting task and it is handled well. I would have personally prefered a bit more meat on the bones of book & manuscript production and the effect of paper as a negative side of the black letter. But it is not written specifically for the specialist and there in lies its charm. This is a terrific read-T.Ely
Rating: 
Summary: Lacks credibility
Review: The Alphabet Versus the Goddess did renew my interest in McLuhan's thesis that "the medium is the message," which Shlain duly noted in the early part of the book, and it gave me an opportunity to think about my own left-brain prejudices in favor of the written word over imagery and oration.
However I can't recommend it as a resource.
While I am sympathetic to the notion the dominance of the "masculine" over the "feminine" has created an imbalance -- perhaps a dangerous imbalance -- throughout our many cultures, glaring historical errors and logical inconsistency undermine any value this book may have in furthering understanding of the evolution of human consciousness. Examples:
1. Regarding renaissance Europe, Shlain states that "Since the Roman Empire, Spain had been an erudite, civilized Catholic society." He apparently is unaware or forgot or does not think it import that the Moors controlled the majority of Spain from the early 8th century to the late 14th century. Perhaps an overzealous editor cut that part out -- still it does not bolster his credibility as a scholar.
2. He repeatedly refers to the the use of writing as tool to promote prejudices, appropriate myths and skew the historical record, but he presents the legends of Moses, Bhudda, Jesus and Mohammed recorded in the Torah, the Sutras, the New Testament and the Quran (all of which, he notes, were committed to writing long after the events they record took place) as essentially factual, despite the lack of corroborating evidence of any other independent historical sources. Why? My only guess is because they were written down. As Shlain quotes in another part of his book to support one of his theories, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence;" however, it is also true that absence of evidence is not evidence of anything.
The above may be picking nits. But when you find one nit, chances are there are more than you can count.
It is unfortunate that this book can not be used as a reliable resource, as the correlations Shlain draws between events are intriguing. At best this book offers some interesting departures for further study.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking
Review: I don't believe everything that Leonard Shlain wrote, but I know that there's more than just a grain of truth in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, and I have considered points brought up in the book every day since I started reading it. It's a thick book, and beyond the goal of portraying the conflict between word and image, it provided a fantastic historical overview of the Abrahamic religions and provided alternate historical interpretations for many other points in history. I was recommended this book this summer and read it as a beach read, and I recommend it to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: A terribly flawed thesis: no evidence to validate it claims.
Review: Dr. Shlain may have credentials to work as a nuerosurgeon but he is totally unqualified and intellectually unfit to talk on the subject matters he holds dear to heart.
The idea that IMAGE disappeared when the ALPHABET was born is so riculous that it would take the hubris of a materialist to make such a claim.
The major arguments I have with Dr. Shlain thesis is that:
The first argument I have with Dr. Shlain thesis and the most important one is that he failed miserable into factoring into his thesis the ESOTERIC SCIENCE, which is a sophicated scientific system of mathematics and linguistics coded to antiquity's literature around the world. The image never when anywhere because when the literature of antiquity was written the mathematical and grammatical sciences, which uses a great deal of graphics and imagery, is coded into that literature. From the surface of the text nothing of the mathematics or graphics are seen. But when the actual textual material is analyzed mathematically and grammatical the graphics and imagery show themselves. Because of this sophicated esoteric science enbedded into the world's literature in antiquity Dr. Shlain thesis is fiction: it is a bed time story dreamt up by a day dreamer.
Dr. Shlain believes his thesis is self-evident and that is quite true if the esoteric science is not factored into his work. But the moment it is factor in Dr. Shlain thesis evaporate into a puff of smoke. From a materialist's point of view the text is what it is on the surface. It can not be believed, by the average person in society, that the amount of words in a designated piece of literature are counted in a verse and chapter and volume to create sophistical mathematical patterns to augment the surface mythology. Why can not the text be plainly written is the question of the materialist and the answer is that human language is a poor medium and communicator of spiritual and abstract ideas. It takes the combination of words and image (via mathematics) to bring out the nuances that the surface texts can never envisage.
The second argument I have is that Dr. Shlain is an admitted evolutionist, which throws up red flags from the outset. People that associates themselves with such blackguards should be taken with a grain of salt. I call evolutionists blackguards because they in the past have commited outright fraud, murder, and interfered in indigenous native cultures to prove their theories and then they wrote books on the foundation of these antics. Evolutionists have absolutely no proof of their hypothesis. One of the most recent works that challenges the world's leading evolutionists, which are responsible for having educated the last three generations of antropologists and evolutionists was written by an investigative journalist Patrick Tierney: "DARKNESS IN EL DORADO. The so-called scientists' works that trained Dr. Shlain's generation into their evolutionary mumbo jumbo have literally committed untold murders and interfered with indigenous native cultures to justify their work in antropology and evolutionary theories. This is the croud that Dr. Shlain claims to be a member of and wishes to be associated with. Now I am not saying all evolutionists are murders or people that interfere in native cultures but those antropologists and evolutionists that wrote those books based upon murdering innocent indigenous natives of South America are the present day evolutionists' mentors. An evolutionist has to work ten thousand times harder to be accepted in decent society over any other science on earth because of their mentors past indicretions, which go back to a number of frauds to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Dr. Shlain needs to come out of his cacoon of materialism and embrace the abstract teachings of the esoteric science.
Rating:
Summary: Outdated research and models make a bad book
Review: Shlain draws on the "bicameral mind" model of the brain for his thesis, which is that the advent of the alphabet caused a rise in left-brain thinking and led to the decline of Goddess religion. Now that we have television and our culture is becoming visually focused again, women's rights and Goddess religion are again on the rise as the right brain's intuitive capacities are engaged.
This thesis is misguided for so many reasons. The bicameral mind model of the brain was discarded decades ago by serious brain researchers as being drastically oversimplified. The idea that masculine/feminine, logical/intuitive, and other such dichotomies are accurate ways of dividing human beings into groups has been discarded by most of those who study gender as ignoring the fact that "logic" and "intuition" are human traits shared by both genders. Even if there are gender-linked tendencies, they are not nearly extreme enough to cause the gender-linked cultural change that Shlain wants to attribute to increased left-brain activity. Finally, although Shlain martials interesting evidence to support his thesis, he relies too heavily on discredited archeological research on the Neolithic (see criticisms elsewhere of Gimbutas et al), and doesn't sufficiently take into account the fact that for most of Western history, the vast majority of the population was not literate. I am not at all convinced by his argument that visual culture ever really went into decline, as a cursory look at art or popular culture history will show.
A good scholar does some research, then comes up with a thesis, then sees if the rest of the data fits. Shlain's problem is that he seems to have come up with his thesis before doing any research, and then sought out only that data that supported it.
Rating:
Summary: Sexist beyond belief
Review: I've read some silly books in my time, but this has to be one of the silliest. Reading and writing, apparently are masculine activities, and somehow in opposition to feminine intuition etc. What a load of rot. How did a book as daft as this ever get published? It's a wonder the author doesn't recommend that wsomen shouldn't learn to read and write at all. How does the author explain the fact that women's status invariably rises in cultures where they do become literate. And how does he know reading and writing were masculine inventions anyway? This book really is pernicious. If you are gullible enough to believe all that stuff about women being intuitive, men being logical etc (i.e. women can only feel, not think) you will probably like this book.
Rating:
Summary: Theory, Sophistry, and Beyond
Review: Is this book great theory or great sophistry? Who knows, who cares. Leonard Shlain's book makes one think differently about the history of civilization. It is bold and provacative. And by reading other reviews, I have found that it not only has stirred people's thoughts, but threatened their beliefs.
The book is a rather dry read and far too wordy. It is not until 2/3rd's the way through that the implications of his theory become truly interesting. But stay with it.
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