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Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neruscientist and childhood reading research center director, offers an enchanting tale about the lore and science of reading through the ages. This history sets the stage for her remarkable overview of the discoveries of neuroscience about the reading brain. From her penetrating interpretation of Socrates critique of writing and defense of the oral tradition to her illumination of dyslexia in its manifold forms (informed by her experience of raising a dyslexic child), she educates, captivates, and enriches as she marshals insights and provocations from science, humanities, and the arts to explore the reading brain and defend the art of reading against the hazards of the Digital Age.
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This is a gripping, enriching portrait of actual events explored through the lens of a fine novelist with a sense of the moral and political ambiguity. It concerns the entanglement of the lives of Elys Mendel (British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin) and Axel von Gottberg (German aristocrat Adam von Trott), two fellow Rhodes scholars, who become caught up in the unfolding vortex of powerful forces that led to World War II and the persecution and death of millions of Jews. Seen through the eyes and quotidian life of one of Mendel's student decades later, the plot is driven by Conrad Senior's obsessive drive to untangle the central puzzle of this afflicted relationship: the contradiction between von Gottberg's friendship-straining letter to a British newspaper exonerating the Germans of Jewish persecution in thirties; Germany and his eventual participation in the unsuccessful military plot to kill Hitler. As the moral equivocations and political conundrums unravel, author Cartwright highlights the tension between the role of individual action and contingency in history and the seeming ineluctability of larger structural elements that brought Nazism to power, unleashed the cunning of unreason, and triggered a devastating world war.
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ErnieY has commented on (2) products.
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
ErnieY, September 9, 2007
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neruscientist and childhood reading research center director, offers an enchanting tale about the lore and science of reading through the ages. This history sets the stage for her remarkable overview of the discoveries of neuroscience about the reading brain. From her penetrating interpretation of Socrates critique of writing and defense of the oral tradition to her illumination of dyslexia in its manifold forms (informed by her experience of raising a dyslexic child), she educates, captivates, and enriches as she marshals insights and provocations from science, humanities, and the arts to explore the reading brain and defend the art of reading against the hazards of the Digital Age.(39 of 56 readers found this comment helpful)
The Song Before It Is Sung by Justin Cartwright
ErnieY, August 12, 2007
This is a gripping, enriching portrait of actual events explored through the lens of a fine novelist with a sense of the moral and political ambiguity. It concerns the entanglement of the lives of Elys Mendel (British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin) and Axel von Gottberg (German aristocrat Adam von Trott), two fellow Rhodes scholars, who become caught up in the unfolding vortex of powerful forces that led to World War II and the persecution and death of millions of Jews. Seen through the eyes and quotidian life of one of Mendel's student decades later, the plot is driven by Conrad Senior's obsessive drive to untangle the central puzzle of this afflicted relationship: the contradiction between von Gottberg's friendship-straining letter to a British newspaper exonerating the Germans of Jewish persecution in thirties; Germany and his eventual participation in the unsuccessful military plot to kill Hitler. As the moral equivocations and political conundrums unravel, author Cartwright highlights the tension between the role of individual action and contingency in history and the seeming ineluctability of larger structural elements that brought Nazism to power, unleashed the cunning of unreason, and triggered a devastating world war.(11 of 17 readers found this comment helpful)