A rather good concept and idea, albeit incomplete: way too much oriented towards the Western hemisphere ( )

I did not read this book by Shlain but I read his previous book, the one that got past the critics. The one about Art and Science. I took a class at Vista college in Berkeley by some guy who was convinced that Shlain is some kind of genius. As a treat at the end of the class Shlain came and did a book pitch for this gem.

We had the opportunity to have him sign it after an astonishing lecture with slides about the "new theories" of human evolution that came out of Shlain.

Shlain is a brain surgeon by trade and he has many various intellectual avocations which he has incorporated into his hodge-podge of tripe that has found regard in some circles of academia. He is the Philosopher in residence at UC Davis.

One of his personal observations is that computers needed to be devised to assist the human species with a continuation of child birthing. He said at the lecture that babies heads have become so large due to the pressure of all the new scientific advancements and such that a person being born now has a greatly increased skull size. The womens pelvises are no longer large enough to pass these monstrously large skulls through in child birth, therefore we needed computers to take some of the knowledge out of our heads and keep the size of baby heads at a reasonable dimension.

But what I found most offensive is the stuff about about the use of the alphabet and its effect on the health of the human mind in general. He suggests that language is a toxic material that will be eliminated over time as the superior female mind begins to overwhelm the world through the creation of a new pictograph language being brought about by the computer age. This is being embraced by new age feminist pagans as a cool idea. It is incredibly anti-intellectual. It is fascistic in its core. It is a notion of eliminating all history and reason to be reinterpreted by these new esoteric beings, the new god women. He is just a cuddly fruitcake. ( )

link: http://eska-rina.livejournal.com/4134... ( )

Shlain presents an exhaustive (and exhausting) tramp through written history to support his thesis that changes in the dominant form of communication upset the balance between brain hemispheres. Replication of this imbalance at a cultural level leads to violence, intolerance, and misogyny. Shlain batters the reader with post hoc evidence and bludgeons them so monotonously with his thesis that I found it difficult to accept even the points with which I agreed—this in spite of his own acknowledgment that correlation does not prove causality. ( )

As Voltaire said of the French novel, "Refinement is rejection." The universal franchise of literacy almost certainly enforces a certain scope of thinking (as in the truth being right there in black and white), but Shalin grossly overstates his case. An interesting premise which gets away from him.