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In a vivid, sweeping, and original history of man's greatest
adventure: his search to discover the world around him -- the relationship of
the heavens to his own planet, the elusive and mysterious dimension of time, the
vast and colorful range of plants and animals, the intricate workings of his own
body, the surprising variety of human societies past and present -- by the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of The Americans, now the Librarian of Congress. His
flair for the vivid anecdote, for fresh points of view, and for the dramatic relationship
of ideas has made him the most readable of our eminent historians. Daniel
J. Boorstin's story of our world is not the usual succession of battles and empires
and political leaders, but a tale of discoveries and beginnings. In this book
the long human quest for what man does not yet know becomes a mystery story played
by a vast cast on an ever-changing stage. Boorstin sees every discovery as an
episode of biography. The heroes of this saga are men with an insatiable hunger
for knowledge and the courage to venture into the unknown. He puts flesh on many
familiar names -- Herodotus, Thucydides, Ptolemy, Galen, Marco Polo, Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Faraday, Marx, Freud -- and resurrects from almost
forgotten history some truly remarkable figures. His narrative reveals not only
mankind's imaginative leaps forward in its search for knowledge, but the obstacles
that had to be overcome; the illusions we held about the continents and the seas
before Columbus and Balboa and Magellan, about the past before Petrarch and Winckelmann,
Thomsen, and Schliemann, about the human body before Paracelsus and Vesalius and
Harvey, about the physical world and the atom before Newton and Dalton and Einstein.
Why didn't the Chinese discover America? Why were people so
slow to learn the earth goes around the sun? How and why did we begin to think
of "species" of plants and animals? How, when, and why did people begin
digging in the earth to learn about the past? How did the study of economics begin?
These are but a few of the fascinating questions that Dr. Boorstin answers in
The Discoverers. And finally, "this is a
story without end," writes Dr. Boorstin, for the world remains "a boundless
stage for discoveries to come. The most important words ever written on the maps
of human knowledge are terra incognita -- unknown territory."
Daniel J. Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress since 1975,
was the director of the National Museum of History and Technology and senior historian
of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. At the University of Chicago,
where he was the Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of
American History, he taught for twenty-five years. Dr.
Boorstin was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, winning a coveted "double-first,"
and was admitted as a barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, London. He has been
visiting professor of American History at the University of Rome, at Kyoto University,
at the University of Puerto Rico, and at the University of Geneva. He was the
first incumbent of the chair of American History at the Sorbonne, and Pitt Professor
of American History and Institutions and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
University, which awarded him its Litt.D. degree. Born
in Georgia and raised in Oklahoma, Dr. Boorstin received his B.A. with highest
honors from Harvard and his doctor's degree from Yale. He is a member of the Massachusetts
Bar and has practiced law. Before going to Chicago in 1944, he taught at Harvard
and Swarthmore. He has lectured widely within this country and all over the world.
The Americans, his most extensive work,
is a trilogy with a sweeping new view of American history, revealing through the
story of our past some of the secrets of the distinctive character of American
culture. The third volume, The Americans: The Democratic
Experience (1973), was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month
Club and won the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. Boorstin has received numerous other awards,
including the Bancroft Prize for The Americans: The
Colonial Experience (1958) and the Francis Parkman Prize
for The Americans: The National Experience
(1965). His books have been translated into the European languages as well as
Chinese and Japanese. Dr. Boorstin is married
to the former Ruth Frankel, who has been editor for all his books. The Boorstins
have three sons. |
