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"Burke, James - Axemaker's Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture - PTN"
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	Rating: none Quantity in Basket:none Code: 0874778565PTN Price:$11.96
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"Paperback. New. List $ 15.95. [Penguin Group (USA)] 368 pages. From the Publisher At the close of this century of creativity and discovery, humanists and scientists alike wonder: How could human beings in all their brilliance - those ""axemakers"" with the genius to invent, lead, inspire, heal, design - have brought the world to the brink of destruction? The answers can be found in The Axemaker's Gift, an imaginative and brilliantly informed double-edged history of human culture. James Burke, a leading expert on the interaction of technology and society, and Robert Ornstein, a pioneer in charting the evolution of consciousness, show how the interaction between innovation and the brain has continually reshaped the world and, more important, the way we think. From The Critics Publishers Weekly Prolific psychologist Ornstein and historian Burke, best known for his PBS-TV series ""Connections"", have written an ambitious, entertaining, not always convincing survey of the interaction of technology, culture, history and the human mind. Early hominids' use of tools, they maintain, altered the brain's structure over millennia, favoring reason over emotion and fostering sequential thinking, which generated language, logic and rules. With the advent of agriculture and writing in Mesopotamia came social hierarchy. The authors strain mightily to prove that successive advances in technic - the Greek alphabet, the weight-driven clock, Gutenberg's printing press, scientific method, London's stock exchange, modern clinical medicine, computers, etc. - radically altered the structure of society, increasingly concentrating power and knowledge in the hands of a specialized ruling elite that imposed ever greater degrees of conformity on the masses. A ""cut-and-control'' outlook that divides the world into manipulable units is held responsible for our present ecological crisis. The authors' proposed solution is a world of small communities with participatory democracy and ""webbed education'' whereby information-technology users can access all knowledge as a dynamic whole. (Sept.) Library Journal Burke, host of the PBS series ""Connections"", and Ornstein, a psychologist and author of the classic text The Psychology of Consciousness (1973), collaborate in this ambitious criticism of progressive societies. Booknews Burke, a television host and columnist for Scientific American, and Ornstein, head of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, show how the interaction between innovation and the brain has continually reshape"

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