Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

In the tradition of Stephen Pinker’s The Language Instinct, Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf—known for her work in dyslexia—offers an eloquent book about how the brain learned to read and, in the process, changed the way we as humans think.

Making the argument that “Human beings were never born to read,” Proust and the Squid explains how the brain that examined tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians was a very different brain from the one tha...