The Discoverers

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The Discoverers is a volume of sweeping range and majestic interpretation. To call it a history of science is an understatement; this is the story of how humankind has come to know the world, however incompletely ("the eternal mystery of the world," Einstein once said, "is its comprehensibility").

Amazon.com: Perhaps the greatest book by one of our greatest historians, The Discoverers is a volume of sweeping range and majestic interpretation. To call it a history of science is an understatement; this is the story of how humankind has come to know the world, however incompletely ("the eternal mystery of the world," Einstein once said, "is its comprehensibility"). Daniel J. Boorstin first describes the liberating concept of time--"the first grand discovery"- -and continues through the age of exploration and the advent of the natural and social sciences. The approach is idiosyncratic, with Boorstin lingering over particular figures and accomplishments rather than rushing on to the next set of names and dates. It's also primarily Western, although Boorstin does ask (and answer) several interesting questions: Why didn't the Chinese "discover" Europe and America? Why didn't the Arabs circumnavigate the planet? His thesis about discovery ultimately turns on what he calls "illusions of knowledge." If we think we know something, then we face an obstacle to innovation. The great discoverers, Boorstin shows, dispel the illusions and reveal something new about the world.

Although The Discoverers easily stands on its own, it is technically the first entry in a trilogy that also includes The Creators and The Seekers. An outstanding book--one of the best works of history to be found anywhere. -- John J. Miller

Ingram: Examines the human quest for knowledge and discoveries in a discussion of the achievements of Galileo, Adam Smith, Columbus, Marx, Napoleon, Magellan, Faraday, Freud, Marco Polo, St. Augustine, and other great discoverers.

About the Author: 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 "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, wich awarded him its Litt.D. degree.

Born in Georgia and raised in Oklahoma, Dr. Boorstin received his B.A. 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 Swathmore.

The Americans, his most extensive work, is a trilogy with a sweeping new voice of American history; 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.