Next book

THE SCIENCE OF READING

INFORMATION, MEDIA & MIND IN MODERN AMERICA

A leggy, fascinating survey of a discipline that is often taken for granted.

From its inception, the science of reading has been intertwined with American anxieties about culture.

The science of reading, writes history professor Johns, began in the latter decades of the 19th century, as the proliferation of print in American life gave rise to worries that it would overwhelm a vulnerable public. The nascent field of experimental psychology studied the process of reading, developing two instruments that would be improved upon and used for decades to come: the tachistoscope, which measured how well subjects recognized words; and the eye-movement camera, which recorded the behavior of subjects’ eyes as they read passages of text. The author’s account ranges back and forth, tracing his topic’s implication in eugenics, adaptation to improvements in World War II aircraft cockpit design, adoption by industry to improve the efficiency of the workforce, and incorporation into modern machine-reading technology. It’s a mammoth subject, and Johns takes some detours to explore, for instance, mid-20th-century librarianship’s adoption of the tools of science to expand its mission. In a later chapter on “the reading wars,” the author delves into Rudolf Flesch’s highly influential 1955 jeremiad, Why Johnny Can’t Read, but those who have familiarity with the push-pull between whole-language and phonics-based teaching will have seen the planting of those seeds in the dismayed discovery that the early-20th-century turn toward science-based instruction in silent reading revealed a population of students with dyslexia. Johns’ argument that this “Manichean dualism” has fed today’s popular suspicion of scientific expertise is dismally convincing. The commercialization of the science of reading is also a constant, seen in the line of products leading from the Ophthalm-O-Graph through the Talking Typewriter, the Dynabook, and Hooked on Phonics, as well as such contemporary products as Feng-GUI and Microsoft’s MCR. Illustrations include laboratory photographs of subjects at formidable-looking testing apparatus and equally daunting diagrams that attest to researchers’ efforts.  

A leggy, fascinating survey of a discipline that is often taken for granted.

Pub Date: April 5, 2023

ISBN: 9780226821481

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago

Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 11


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 11


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Close Quickview