Mr. Battles’s “Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word” is in part an explanation of how it was possible for “a craft so sophisticated and cognitively demanding to knit itself securely into our quotidian ways.” To tell the story of the history of writing, the author, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, draws on evolutionary psychology, anthropology, linguistics and old-fashioned story telling. This fascinating exploration of the evolution of writing shows how, despite radical technological changes, the practice maintains its atavistic mystery.

Source: The Mystical Writing Pad – WSJ