199:“The human nervous system, he says, was substantially rewired when people began reading alphabets. Never mind that there is no scientific evidence for this claim. Even Dr. Shlain admits that correlations don't prove cause and effect.” And “hemispheric lateralization is undergoing a renaissance. now know that the left and right halves of our brains interact dynamically and that specialization, which undoubtedly exists, is a matter of processing style rather than having specific mental traits reside on one side or the other.”
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is said to be a Hindu practice (159); the word is Hindi, but the practice is primarily Muslim. The Aryan invaders are said to have found
Sanskrit in India (161)j Sanskrit was the language of the invading Aryans, being sister to the Iranian languages and first cousin to Greek, Latin, and English. The ranks of the Buddha's disciples are said to have excluded women (174); women are reported in Buddhist writings to have been followers of the Buddha during his lifetime.”
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Shlain began with the insight: "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, which manifests as a decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess
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Other critics focus on a perhaps inevitable consequence of Shlain's wide-ranging application of his paradigm: errors of fact. “The factual errors in the book would take more space to detail than is worth devoting to their listing. A couple of examples must suffice. Purdah (the segregation of women)
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A third critical approach addresses the paradigm itself as overly simplistic. Kirkus
Reviews calls the book, “Continually engaging, although on the whole quite woolly.” “This is one of those annoying books, in which I find some bits gripping and enlightening, and other bits simply untenuously
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worship." He then applied this paradigm to 35 pairs of concepts and historical periods. These include, for example, Image/Word; Hunters/Gatherers; Aleph/Bet; Dionysus/Apollo; Birth/Death; Illiteracy/Celibacy, 500–1000; Faith/Hate; and Page/Screen, 1945–2000.
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McEwan, Dorothea. “Book
Reviews : Shlain, Leonard, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Male Words and Female Images (Harmondsworth Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, 1998), Pp 464.” Feminist Theology 8, no. 23 (January 2000): 124–26.
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that is slapdash and amateurish...None the less, this is a stimulating read, and the central notion that women have not been fully welcome or at home in western civilisation is, ambiguously, seductive."
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Several reviewers have commented that the book is readable and engaging: "And yet, having put all my reservations on the table, I am still left with a good feeling about some parts of the book.”
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Criticism has been leveled at the book from several angles. Some critics dispute the scientific basis of Shlain's claims. Sandra
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The
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Algeo, John. The
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The
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The Origin of
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is a work of historical anthropology by
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