The Left Stuff: How the Left-Handed Have Survived and Thrived in a Right-Handed World

Thanks

Answering a lot of questions that every handleft had asking some day in our lives, this book throw out some myths about, it let us to know interesting anecdotic stories -for example, do you know why people use greet with right hand and not with the other one? or when you can say a person is lefty?- and give us a overview of scientific knowledge about laterality. Some history about. Some science about.Some false statements are submit to the dock using academic data and documents from institutions; lefties are not the demmon, but niether genious. Lefties are not less longed lived than rigth handed. Each country have diferent incidence of lefties, because of cultural relations like writting way are important in laterality and number of lefties increasing.How the brain and evolutions it works with the choice hands? and other questions are done.If you are rigth handed, i think, this book hardly will be usefull, you won't be identified with this concepts. But if you are Lefty sure you will feel very close with this and Left stuff is the rigth book.

I have been planning to give five stars to this book … until the moment that I saw Ms. Roth had misdescribed one of the sources she quotes (early 19th-century Scottish poet James Hogg, known to his readers as "the Ettrick Shepherd" from his birth-town and his first career) as being "an Englishmen [sic] named Ettrick Shepherd" writing in medieval times.") Making three errors (of name, place, and time) in one sentence is reason enough to assign only four stars. Please, Ms. Roth — in your next edition, correct your triple slip: it shows badly. Almost as bad is something that would have further lowered my review to 3 1/2 stars if Amazon permitted fractional stars — Ms. Ruth's odd misrepresentation of the Biblical tribe of Benjamin (which counted 700 left-handed slingshot experts among its 26,000 fighting men) as being composed _solely_ of those 700 left-handers! (The source she's misrepresenting there is Judges 20:15-16). This, too, should be fixed — as should the hefty sprinkling of smaller typos throughout the book: deeply unfortunately in a work that should have deserved five stars because of the wealth of actually good, worthwhile, and seldom-seen information it provides: _most_ of which is provided correctly.)

Easy to read and very enjoyable

I'm not a lefty, I just know some. If you're a lefty, know a lefty, or just want to know what's up with them, this is a good book and a fun, educational read. The science is pared down enough so that just about anyone can handle it- it will only alienate really non-science people, as well as really hard-core scientists (who will find it dumbed down). For the majority, it's scientific enough without being overwhelming, and has plenty of fun facts, history, and name-dropping to make righties think twice about their superiority.

A bit dry and technical. A quick read. Learned some interesting facts but overall sort of boring. At least the price was low.

This is the perfect combination of entertaining reading and serious insights. The author not only writes extremely well, she is the consummate researcher who has built upon the research of many others. I'm righty-tighty myself, but, as this books shows...who knows?

As the right handed parent of a very left handed child, I initially picked this book up to see if there were things I could apply to help him get a good start with writing, fine motor skills, etc. I am delighted to report that this book was rather fantastic at helping me comprehend how my son faces the world, as well as a very in depth look at the prejudices of being left handed (good heavens, some are downright ridiculous) including the unconscience right handed bias of objects I had never realized as being one sided. It does contain a lot of technical writing, but I love that it was so heavily sourced from a variety of sources - both academic and current history. I am encouraged by several things in this book and really appreciate the insight to how my son's brain literally works. It reads well and also gives hints to other fascinating links I'd never previously considered as related to left handed ness. The ending may be dry, but this was a very worth my time read.

One of the very few books out there, addressing the "problem" of Left-Handedness ( because, believe it or not, even nowadays, in some parts of the world, being left-handed is considered a stigma/curse/illness which needs to be either hidden, redressed or cured). A left-handed myself, forced to switch to my non-dominant hand as a child and learn to write with my right hand, I was though not aware of the tremendous amount of stigma surrounding the left-handers. A really interesting, informative and heartwarming reading ( not only for left-handers).

Arrived on time, in the described condition, price ok - what more can I ask. I haven't had any comments from the receiver of the gift.