The Look, Mom, No Hands Alphabet Book Every single spelling (following General American—GA—pronunciation) is regular. Every letter represents one phoneme only. No exceptions! No confusing rules to complicate matters. No digraphs. Easier to learn than Finnish or Spanish! Although educators, government officials, and informed citizens everywhere agree that super-human efforts and actions must be taken to confront our illiteracy catastrophe, what to do is stuck in the rut of an endless, inane, obfuscating debate over "Phonics" vs. "Whole Language," neither of which has the remotest capability to untie the knot with which our ancient spelling has hogtied us. NuSpel makes the whole argument moot, satisfying every forlorn, misguided hope the "Phonics" advocates continue to coddle and taking every bit of wind out of their "Whole Language" antagonists' sails. As has oft been derisively noted, "Phonics" trips over its own name, suggesting p-honics. Give its proponents credit, however, for fostering a system that is 100% sound for Spanish, Finnish and other languages with decent alphabets. "Sounding out," when it works, is without question the soundest way to go, but with a spelling that has been mixed up and messed up for centuries, not only beginners but advanced readers too can only guess wildly at the pronunciation of every unfamiliar word. Epitome and catastrophe, for example, "logically," confidently and erroneously pronounced to rime with home and loaf. The problem is not with p-honics but with our unbelievably archaic, incredibly irregular, unpredictable non-system of spelling. As for "Whole Language" (which essentially means copious reading of appealing, interesting, enthusiasm-generating texts rather than dull, artificial "phonics" ones), with a respectable, scientific alphabet even little kindergartners will be able to handle anything at all in terms of sounding it out, and the only challenge will be the rate at which they can build their vocabularies‹most commonly simply by deriving meanings from context, though glossaries and graphic illustrations of meanings could be part of every beginning reader. With Space-Age reform of our Dark-Ages spelling, "Learning to read by reading" will automatically become a commonplace everyday reality for us. The valuable i.t.a. (initial teaching alphabet) experiments carried out in both the United Kingdom and the United States suggest a nonpareil way to accelerate the acquisition of reading skills while simultaneously implementing spelling reform. Unfortunately, the i.t.a. proponents' focus has been exclusively on children, whereas it must always be incumbent on adults to set the example and lead the way. Narrowly intended for teaching reading in the first grades only, with no commitment beyond throwing out a lifesaver just temporarily for children rather than a permanent lifeline not only for them but for all of us, the i.t.a. approach, as practiced, has acquired no momentum. Taking a leaf from i.t.a. (which has employed some unnecessarily weird letters) and vastly improving on it, The Look, Morn, No Hands! Alphabet Book is designed to overwhelmingly demonstrate how speedy and easy learning to read can be with a spelling that surpasses even that of Spanish—winning over even the willfully blind among us prone to obstinately resist welcoming the light and opening their eyes.