The Alphabet and the Goddess

[ikhet_sekhmet]

I read a devastating short review of Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet and the Goddess. Now to be fair, I haven't read this book; I have glanced at it, and was immediately suspicious of the idea that the alphabet shifts thought to the left brain and therefore culture to violent patriarchy. It's all too easy to project whatever ideas we like onto peoples that have left no written record. The review yanks the carpet out from under the book entirely, pointing out that speech predates writing. If language is linear and hierarchical, those properties altered our brains millennia before writing of any kind - let alone the alphabet.
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Algeo, John. The Awful Alphabet (review of Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image. New York, Viking, 1998.). American Speech 76(4) 2001 pp 427-429.