Speed Reading: Third Edition

The copyright date is shown as 1991 but this is in fact a book from the 1970's. The information is very outdated, hard to follow, and much of it is simply wrong.

You are better off going with a newer syste like Speed Reader-X which is also available through Amazon and includes software training tools or one of the newer Evelyn Woods(not the older stuff). You will be very limited in your ability to learn speed reading from a book, it is not the best teaching method, go with a software or web based system instead.

Like in all of his books, Tony Buzan reiterates his favorite assertions on mind mapping and mental abilities of a human.

This book consists of history and the new developments of speed reading, self tests and exercises, mixed with short essays on physiologic aspects of reading, like left and right cortical research, the number of brain cells and their interconnections, the anatomy of eyes (including the cross-section), control of eye movements t to increase the speed and comprehension of reading (with diagrams of eyes' progression while reading).

The author addressed the common reading problems: subvocalization, finger-pointing, regression and back-skipping, and presents the new approaches to overcoming them. He gives practical advises on improving your concentration and increasing your comprehension. Much attention is given to developing advanced skimming and scanning techniques, range reading skills, metronome training.

The book finishes with tips on getting control of different kinds of text: the newspapers, literature and poetry.

In addition to this book, I can recommend exercising with a speed reading audio program, that should be listened while reading. I can suggest "The Speed Reading 16-Minute Audio Program" which I have personally used.

Good content...but today's teens will not sit down and use this book.It is very technical.

I have several of Tony Buzan's books, and I appreciate his work very much. Although I don't believe that he is the only word in mind improvement, he has been extremely helpful to me.

And this book was no exception. He covers what I feel to be important parts of reading speed improvement -- using the hand to guide, the different guiding movements, improving eye span (among other things). He also touches on the importance of building up vocabulary, and of course, Tony Buzan would not be Tony Buzan if he didn't mention something about Mind Mapping -- another tool of his that has helped me greatly.

You'll have to put in some dedicated, sustained effort into the exercises in this book. They are understandable, but improving reading speed is always a challenge. I've improved my reading speed through this book, and I want to take the book again and work with it to keep the skill up.

I can't answer for those who say that the book did them no good. Perhaps it didn't. But it did do me good. And I'm glad I bought it.

The book reviews common problems and techniques to overcome them in reading and comprehend a text at high and very high speed (words per minute), and presents a method (or better a bundle of methods) developed by the author and its collaborators: this method requires hard work and so the book is full
of various exercises. Nevertheless the pace of exposition is slow to ease comprehension of the method: a glimpse of history of high speed reading thechniques is also provided. It is well documented as other texts form the same author, i.e. it has a bibliography, and also it has a index.