The San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle reviews the latest page-turner, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess:

For Dr. Leonard Shlain, brain anatomy is only the introduction to a more significant dichotomy. He believes the split brain is gendered, with language belonging to the masculine, imagery to the feminine. In a dazzling, once-over-lightly tour of world history, he concludes that the adoption of the alphabet is inseparable from male dominance: "When a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemisphere modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemisphere ones, which manifests as a decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship." And with the decline of the goddess comes the violence against humanity and nature that makes up so much of our history.

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