Book description
In ABC... philosopher and cultural analyst Ivan Illich and medieval
scholar and literary critic Barry Sanders have produced an original,
meticulous and provocative study of the advent, spread and present
decline of literacy. They explore he impact of the alphabet on
fundamental thought processes and attitudes, on memory, on political
groupings and religous and cultural expectations. Their examination of
the present erosion of literacy in the new technological languages of
'newspeak' and 'uniquack' and they point out how new attitudes to
language are altering our world viewour sense of self and of community.
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish
mother, and had as native languages Italian, French and German. He later
learnt Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grand-fathers, then Ancient
Greek and Latin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Thereafter,
he studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence
(Italy), theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University
in the Vatican (1942-1946) and medieval history in Salzburg. He is the
author of Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment,
Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the
Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind,
Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and
Addresses 1978-1990. Illich lived much of his life in Mexico and the
United States, he died in 2002.
