A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age

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The subtitle misses the book's most important point: that literacy builds on a foundation of playful and eloquent orality. The Kirkus review seems unreasonably harsh on the maternal point; the benefits of breastfeeding hardly amount to an anti-feminist argument.

Here's another cultural critic (among a few but growing number) who calls our fascination with electronic media into question. Barry Sanders argues that literacy is on the decline, in large measure because of our fixation on electronically created sources of "knowledge" -- tv, computer games, videos, software. The problem is, these much-heralded technological breakthroughs fail to give us a coherent sense of our own "voice." Sanders believes that the narrative power of true literary sources (stories, myths,and BOOKS, DAMMIT!) provides us with a necessary framework for interpreting our own pains and frustrations, and connects us to others in meaningful ways. In a culture where more and more of the young prefer to be amused by passively responding to electronic images, these same persons find their angst disconnected from the context of shared humanity. No wonder then, that we read about senseless killings where child-perpetrators feel no remorse for their victims. No acquired voice, no humanity ... so they violently lash out when meaninglessness becomes unbearable. Read this book and then engage in subterfuge acts -- like joining book discussion groups, reading aloud to kids, writing journals, and otherwise declining to allow electronic gadgets to do your "thinking" for you. Radical? In these times, you bet