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| Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain | 
 enlarge | Author: Maryanne Wolf
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.40
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Avg. Customer Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 9359
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0060933844
Dewey Decimal Number: 573
EAN: 9780060933845
ASIN: 0060933844
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
"Human beings were never born to read," writes Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf. Reading is a human invention that reflects how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new. In this ambitious, provocative book, Wolf chronicles the remarkable journey of the reading brain not only over the past five thousand years, since writing began, but also over the course of a single child's life, showing in the process why children with dyslexia have reading difficulties and singular gifts. Lively, erudite, and rich with examples, Proust and the Squid asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians was a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy. The potential transformations in this changed reading brain, Wolf argues, have profound implications for every child and for the intellectual development of our species.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 36 more reviews...
 Proust and the Squid January 9, 2009
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain This book deserves close and repeated reading by any teacher, person interested in neurology or psychology, or parent with a child with a reading problem. It contains a wonderful history of reading from cuneiform Babylonian and Chinese by way of the critical Greek contribution to Google, and how the human brain, which was never designed for reading, adapts to this new challenge during the the first years of life, with many surprising variations and deviations which are just now becoming understood. This fascinating book, good reading for the specialist and yet quite readable by the general public, is well written and contains notes, referencs and an index.
 One star lost because it is audio book: please use printed version December 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
One thing that comes to mind immediately is that this book should have never been published as an audio book. This book is about the very process of reading and a reader's interaction with books. Listening to the text is not what I would have in mind in this particular case. The listening makes it difficult to understand some of the sparsely used neuroscience terminology. It also requires additional effort to visualize the examples used in the text and distinguish quotations from the narrator's voice. Finally, there is no opportunity to reread a confusing line of text after the semantic center in your brain sounds a misunderstanding alarm around 400 milliseconds after hearing it.
Despite all of these problems, I enjoyed listening to this book.
In my world, Proust and the Squid strangely reminds me of well known book by Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason". In both cases, the authors take subjects so well known to modern society as to seem trivial and then demonstrate the complex side of the concept in question and the dangerous level of misunderstanding surrounding it.
Why we read? How do children learn to read and how did we learn to read as a species in the first place? How does a person who reads Chinese differ in brain organization from person who reads English, and does he differ at all? Why do some people have tremendous difficulties learning to read? Does modern computer technology makes Socrates' worst nightmares a reality? This is just a small portion of the plethora of questions this book addresses. While there may seem to be too many questions to address just in one book, Proust and the Squid, with its multitude of well-executed examples, skillfully touches on and explains all of the important aspects and history behind the topic of reading.
I would say this book should be read by current and future teachers to aid in their work with kids, especially kids with dyslexia, as it has an in-depth analysis of the problem. I would also highly recommend it to parents who, in our busy times, have difficulty finding a moment to read Mother Goose stories to their children.
This book is one that society should seriously consider.
Brilliant. One of the best books I've encountered this year (a review of the audiobook) December 23, 2008
Filled with everyday examples but also full of technical explanations about how the brain actually works when it reads, this book is a bit of history, a bit of science, a bit of philosophy, a bit of educational theory and a whole lot of learning bundled into an entertaining package.
I may be an ideal reader for Maryanne Wolf since I am a foreign language teacher, a history teacher, I love reading and I am very much interested in how boys, in particular, suffer from reading difficulties (Wolf cites biological research that is butressed by others who say we start too early to try to teach our students and we label students too early as having reading difficulties).
Wolfe explores the early history of writing and reading, the different types of writing and how the brain reacts to them, the dangers and positives of written text, how the brain actually physically reads, reading difficulties such as dyslexia and postulates on the future of reading in our new digital age. Wonderful stuff - all of it.
Audiobook notes: Well-read by actress Kirsten Potter, the audiobook version comes on 7 CDs and lasts about 8 hours 15 minutes. Oh, and yes I do appreciate the irony in listening to the audiobook version of a book about reading.
Great content, but the science is hard to study on 7 CDs December 20, 2008
I have listened to many audio books, but this is the first to describe the Sumerian logosyllabulary. That statement encompases the wonder and curse of this product, the audio CD version of the book, Proust and the Squid.
I'm going to deliver brief comments about the material, written by Professor Maryanne Wolf, and also the audio presentation. First the material: This is a layman's introduction to the neuropsychology of reading, and in particular, of how children to learn to read. If you are a parent, educator or medical professional with an interest in this topic, you will undoubtedly find it interesting, accessible, and complete. The author does a good job balancing jargon with understandability for non-experts. In particular, she does a very good job humanizing the material, with many anecdotes about children learning to read.
Now for the audio presentation and media. There may be a neuropsychological explanation for my opinion, but I would have preferred to read this one. I enjoy audio books, but the nature of this material would have worked better on the printed page for me. Many times I found myself wanting to review earlier concepts, which is easy in a printed book, but much harder in audio, especially spread across seven CDs. If a table of contents or index had been included with the audio version, that might have helped satisfy my desire to flip back to review earlier concepts.
As another reviewer mentioned, it is more than a little ironic that this book about reading is presented in audio format. If I were ever to meet the author, I would love to get her reaction to this!
Bottom line: five stars for the quality of the material, minus a star for difficulty of reviewing material spread across 7 CDs. If you are interested in the topic, and aren't the kind of person who flips back and forth in science books, they you will probably rate it 5 stars.
Intelligent writing is alive and well! December 18, 2008
This recorded book was simply a wonderful experience. It makes a great "listen", and I suspect it would make an even better "read"..
The Book: One of the best things about this book was what it did NOT do. Although the style was accessible and enjoyable for a lay person, it made no attempt to "dumb down" the material. There were many interesting, pertinent anecdotes and examples, but the author avoids the current fad of using so many character studies that the reader has a hard time finding the informational material. The examples elaborate on and clarify the information; the information does not appear to be a footnote to the examples! She uses numerous technical terms, but they are defined or their meaning is otherwise clearly understandable to the reader who is not a specialist. I read a book like this to be informed in an enjoyable fashion and without having to consult a technical dictionary. Dr. Wolf more than met my expectations.
When I began the book I expected to hear about the psychology and science of reading. That subject was covered extremely well, but in addition I found a bonus that made the book truly special: sections on the history and even the PHILOSOPHY of reading. The discussion of early writing provided history that was completely new to me, and a discussion of a Platonic dialogue that warned about the dangers of writing versus an oral tradition was both amusing and intriguingly modern-sounding, as we struggle today with the implications of electronic media for the future of reading. The bulk of the book covers present-day thinking on learning to read and especially reading disabilities, an emphasis that is not surprising since this is the author's field of expertise. It was interesting but perhaps overly drawn-out. Maybe I just did not appreciate some of the nuances, but she seemed to be a bit repetitive here. This small shortcoming, however, is excusable in someone who clearly loves her field, and it should not be a deterrent to reading this fascinating book.
The Recording: The Reader, Kirsten Potter, has a very pleasant and CLEAR voice, easy to understand even in noisy environments. A pet peeve of mine is readers who mispronounce unusual terms, and she does an excellent job on the technical terms. Indeed, I discovered, when pushed to justify my annoyance, that I have been mispronouncing "occipital" for years! Ms. Potter had a special challenge in this book on READING, because in several places the author would say something like, "Read the passage below" in order to make a point about the process of reading. I felt Ms. Potter handled these passages very well, although she obviously could not duplicate the reading process exactly.
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