The Alphabet vs. The Goddess

The Alphabet vs. The Goddess
by Leonard Shlain
Rating: 5 of 5 stars


My Review:
I found this book somewhat by accident. Clicking around on Amazon, looking for a book and found this as a recommendation. It looked so interesting, but I waited a while to read it. It's a very dense book and took a long time for me to read.


Normally I finish a book within 2-3 days. This book took me three weeks. It was packed with so much information, you just can't read it to quickly. In fact, I should have read it even slower in order to stop and look up some of the uncommon words he uses.


Anyway, this book takes you throughout human history to look at when the written alphabet came to each culture and what changes happened religiously and socially during that time. Dr. Shlain makes some pretty intriguing connections about how the creation of the written alphabet in a culture tends to be near the same time that male deities are exalted and female deities are pushed aside. He includes other "right brain" functions like art as something that gets disdained as a culture focuses more on the power of the written word.


Dr. Shlain jumped around years quite often during a given time period so I had some trouble connecting if something happened before or after (there were quite a few times that he mentions a year, then mentions something happening 10 years later, then something else 20 years earlier).


I love the "what ifs" and this book was very engrossing. Dr. Shlain wrote this book in 1998, so you have to extrapolate some of the technology that's progressed since then, but the end of this book is very hopeful. Maybe we are on the upswing of finding a good balance between male and female, logic and instinct, art and history.