[REVIEW] Ed Wright, A Left-Handed History of the World

[rfmcdonald]

I have been waiting for International Lefthanders Day just for the chance to review this one book.

I belong to a minority group, one that has long been unfairly subjected to prejudice on the basis of our shared innate difference and that has only recently been freed from this prejudice. I speak, of course, of left-handers, amounting to between 7 and 10% of the human population. There's nothing sinister about being left-handed, I've joked, yet for millennia there has been much prejudice, much hindrance. Were I born a generation earlier, I might have gotten off lightly by being forced to write with my right hand. Researches on handedness don't reveal any outstanding reason for this prejudice: Perhaps left-handers in the aggregate exhibit greater aptitudes for language or math or spatial relations, certainly left-handers are more likely than right-handers to be non-heterosexual, but nothing outstanding appears to justify this prejudice. Only a patchwork of biographies to testifies to the past.

Australian writer Ed Wright's 2007 A Left-Handed History of the World (Pier 9) deals successfully enough with this gap, assembling short biographies of prominent left-handers through history from Ramses the Great to the current crop of American presidents. (Barack Obama, I was pleased to learn, is one of my kind.) The left-handed content of I>A Left-Handed History of the World comes with the sidebars to the individual biographies, exploring the extent to which traits associated with left-handed people manifested in the lives of individuals profiles. We are, apparently, great conquerors, and experimenters, and good at seeing the world in new ways.

This was a fun book, all said. Recommended.

(See also this note from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.)