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.
