A History of Writing
Reaktion Books: 2001. 352 pp. £19.95, $29.95
Writing is a sophisticated accomplishment. Was it therefore the product of intelligent design as the eighteenth-century churchman William Paley famously argued, or was it gradually cobbled together by Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker? Are the hundreds of different scripts still in use each a special creation, or are they branches of a single tree? Steven Fischer stands firmly on the side of interdependence, accident and chains of minor improvement. A History of Writing traces the geographic spread of literacy from the Middle East to the world at large, including China and Central America, and its conceptual development from tokens and pictograms to syllabaries and alphabets. The book considers the diverse social and political implications of literacy, and concludes with some interesting speculation on the possible future of writing in an age of computer icons and voice recognition. All readers are likely to learn something new or to encounter a question they had never thought about before.
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