Disclaimer: I read A Left-Hand Turn Around the World by David Wolman because I am a southpaw. While reading the book, I certainly empathized with the author on finding a good pair of scissors and the trouble of determining seats when dining. This may color my experience of reading the book, as most right-handed reviewers will not intuitively grasp the travails that Wolman mentions throughout the book.

Most of the world has had some passing experience with southpaws. Lefties are most noticeable in sports, particularly, baseball (where the term southpaw originated) or tennis. Just watch the last few innings of any Major League Baseball game and you'll be inundated with commercial breaks as the teams switch pitchers to handle the batting order. For families with a left-hander there is the unique headache of seating for dinner. Either the lefty is placed at one of the left corners of the table or they will spend most of dinner knocking elbows with siblings. My family quickly learned to keep me at the proper corner else I wreak havoc during mealtime. They were also kind enough to give me special rulers, scissors, notebooks, pens, and other gag gifts for my birthday. Little reminders that I had to do everything in reverse.

That's right. I was a customer of the real-life equivalent to Ned Flander's Leftorium from the Simpsons. These stores proudly sold all the paraphernalia I could use including the t-shirts that proclaimed "Only left-handed people are in their right minds," echoing Paul Broca's discovery that the different lobes of the brain controlled the motor skills of the opposite side of the body.

So what has happened since 1861 when Broca made this discovery? In A Left-Hand Turn Around the World, David Wolman sets out to report on the current understanding of the genetic importance and deviance of left-handedness. After stopping off at the Dupuytren Museum in Paris to see the brains that made Broca famous, Wolman travels to New Zealand, Japan, England, Toledo, Atlanta, Quebec, and Left Hand, West Virginia to investigate the evolutionary enigma of left-handedness.

At Emory University, Wolman learns that most animals have no limb preference. The most noticeable exceptions outside of humans are parrots and our closest relatives, the chimpanzee. According to Dr. William Hopkins, the Living Links Research Associate at Emory University, chimpanzees show a preference for right-handedness with the ratio being around 7:3 (as compared to the human ratio of 9:1). Hopkins hopes this research will help our understanding of the evolutionary factors behind the preference and our language ability as handedness and speech seem to be connected in our cerebral cortex. This points Wolman toward territory covered by Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and Marian Annett who has developed the Right Shift Theory. For the first few chapters Wolman follows these theories down a trail that leads to Nobutaka Hirokawa's research on the spinning monocilia that are most likely responsible for the asymmetry of our anatomy.    


Wolman interweaves NPR-ish stories of left-handed culture with the theoretical research on the evolutionary stimuli to keep the book moving. For each chapter on science, the reader is treated to an excursion to some quirky event or location. From a trip to the Ferniehirst castle in Jedburgh, where a left-handed staircase was built by Andrew Karr in order to give him the advantage in a swordfight, to a two-day left-handed golf tournament in Japan, the book shows how some lefties have asserted their uniqueness. Wolman also diverges from the sciences to take a look at the mystical importance culture and religion places on the hand. Wolman takes a 30-hour course in Vedic Palmistry in Quebec, studies at the Handwriting University and meets with Diabolos Rex, the Megister Templi for the Church of Satan in order to deepen his understanding of how religion views his affliction.

While these chapters are light and buoy the book from the heavier chapters on science, they contribute very little to the deeper investigation of why left-handedness exists. All they do is show that that the deck is stacked against lefties (with the exception of sports and toll booths). There is very little here on the reason why most cultures equate the left hand with evil.

In the end, this is a microhistory that focuses more on the science than the culture of lefties. It raises the reader's understanding past the pithy stories on how most cultures have always considered the left side sinister and tries to get at the reason why left-handedness has been important for human existence. The reader is treated to a look at how science is still confounded when faced with the "problem" of left-handedness and how the unique structure may provide answers to some of the big questions in the history of human evolution.