Adam Shields

Takeaway: Everything we do changes our brains.  The repetitive action of computer and internet work is very effective at changing our brains.  This has implications for everything.

The Shallows is not a new book.  It has been out for about two years and many people, much smarter than I have had their take at it.  My short review, Carr has lots of good points, which tend to be lost amidst his hyperbole and cherry picked stats.

At the center of this argument is that people are reading books less. And he has some statistics from the Bureau of Labor to show this.  But as I talked about on this blog the National Endowment for the Arts study shows the largest increase in reading in decades (in all types of reading except poetry).  Right off the bat, this severely undercuts his argument.  The Library of Congress study came out after the book, so I don’t blame him for not using it.  But even if it had come out I think he would have disputed it.  Because in that study a novel is counted as reading a novel no matter what format you read it in.  But Carr does not believe that.

“An ebook is no more related to a book than an online newspaper is related to a print newspaper.” (By which, he means that they are not hardly related at all in the context of the quote.)

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Takeaway: The Reformation is very important to the history of Christianity and Europe, but the mythology of the Reformation is often overplayed and detrimental to understanding modern history.

This is the third book I have read in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series.  And I continue to be impressed.  I have done some reading on the reformation and taken two different History of Christian classes that included the reformation.  But even at only 135 pages of content, this book was able to add to knowledge of the Reformation.  The plan of this book is to debunk some of the myths while showing how much the different sides of the reformation really agreed.  Here is the thesis statement from the book:

Myths are not lies, but symbolically powerful articulations of sensed realities. It is probably safer to believe that all the myths about the Reformation are true, rather than that none of them are. The goal of producing a totally unmythologized account of the Reformation may be an unachievable, or even an undesirable, one. Nonetheless, this little book ““ drawing on the best, not always impartial, modern scholarship ““ will attempt to explain what sort of phenomenon the Reformation was, to assess its impact across religious, political, social, and cultural areas of life, and the character of its legacy to the modern world.

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