“I was recently given the opportunity to read this book and have ambled leisurely through each page, gaining new insights for the motivation of young people, raised in a society characterized by visual bombardment, to discover or rediscover the love of learning from books.”
Steven K. Szmutko

The sad truth about the state of literature today …
And what we can do about it
The recent National Endowment for the Arts survey found that “total book reading is declining significantly” and that “for the first time in modern history, less than half of the adult population now reads literature.” Especially alarming is a 28 percent drop among young readers age 18 to 24. The rate of decline is increasing and, according to the survey, has nearly tripled in the last decade. Though television, the Internet, movies, and video games have lured students away from serious reading, there is good news. In Goodbye Gutenberg, you will discover how these very same technologies can be harnessed to lure younger readers back into books.

 The secrets of winning the attention of younger readers
“From her unique perspective as a high school teacher, Valerie Kirschenbaum has made some stunning discoveries about learning - that children learn much better when teachers use body language, that body language can be brought into writing with color and image which excite different groups of cells in the brain, that emotional arousal amplifies memory, that there is such a thing as visual thinking, and that word and image used simultaneously integrates brain operations and allows the student to come to a higher level of understanding more quickly.”
Pam Hanna

In Goodbye Gutenberg, you will discover:

• How color improves reader response rate by 34%
• Why the educational books of the Middle Ages used red, green, blue and purple colored words
• Which regions of the brain are activated by color and which by black and white
• Dozens of startling facts about how the brain works
• Which cultures use imagery as healing medicine
• The five colors of ink Chaucer used when writing the Cantebury Tales
• Which technologies can be harnessed to create new kinds of educational materials

“The book and its ideas can be a wonderful catalyst into any subject as its fundamental premise is that in order to learn new things, we must open our minds and eyes and imaginations."
Dr. Daniel J. Maloney

“The author, a passionate practitioner of the teaching arts in an inner-city classroom, has, amidst the ruins of print-based culture, rediscovered how to connect with the fullest possible range of a would-be reader's senses. This is all the more timely, given what the rising generation internalizes as the normal way of information-processing.”
Lloyd A. Conway

“What comes through in every page of this book, which I cannot adequately describe, is that Ms. Kirschenbaum is the most dedicated of teachers and decent of people. Chaucer would have said of her, "gladly did she learn and gladly did she teach."
Foster Corbin, Attorney and former English Instructor

Click on any of the thumbnails at left
See why early reviewers have been astonished by these imaginative designs... Find out why they have hailed Goodbye Gutenberg as the blueprint for the coming Renaissance in literature and the arts... Or click here for a complete, chapter by chapter tour.