Title: A one-eyed book but with good vision in the remaining eye!
Product review: This is a strange book: it's `true believer' rhetoric is irritating to put it mildly. When it steps outside the area of competence of its author (strategies for the practice of teaching reading) it is usually plain silly. Ignore the chapters on `Not so universal education' and `Is anyone in the schools listening'. McGuiness's `sociology of education' is puerile. But the rest of the book gives a very good presentation of what appears to be one sensible approach to the teaching of reading. Even here, however, if one stuck to the presription without additionally stressing the need to teach reading for comprehension and reading in context, my guess is the result would be disaster. I am not surprised that Pinker gives it such an enthusiastic foreward: his work tends to be one-eyed as well, but with acute vision in the remaining eye.
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