Daniel Boorstin (1914–2004)

For years this was one of those books in my collection that I would read a chapter that I was interested in then put down. Finally, I decided I was going to read everything that I hadn't read already. I did that as well as rereading quite a few chapters that I had already covered a few years ago. What a wonderful work of art this very lengthy book is! So many literary portraits of so many fascinating characters. I wish this would have been required reading when I took a history of science show more class in college (or at least parts of it). With the right guide, I would have come out better educated and perhaps chose a more interesting research project. The Discovers turns out to be an extremely engaging tour of the history of science in western civilization by the late erudite Daniel Boorstin. More accurately, it is a history of those who shaped our understanding of the world as we know and live it today. For instance, Columbus was not a scientist as we think of a scientist but his voyages cannot be separated from the development of the sciences of cartography, navigation and geography. While a popular history, The Discovers always draws the reader deeper in individual subjects rather than leading to a smug superficial knowledge. If I could provide one humble criticism it is that Boorstin, for all his reputation, is philosophically shallow. Such a lengthy treatise should ask some deeper questions about what we've lost in the pursuit of science. Everywhere, philosophical progress and theological collapse are assumed to be inseparable from the Western trajectory of scientific knowledge and advance. Nonetheless, the Discoverers is better than an encyclopedia because Boorstin is a master of narrative. Yet, it is also, I believe, purposefully non-encyclopedic in its breadth. It ends with Faraday and Maxwell and only alludes to the 20th c. atomic scientists and says nothing about the moon landing. Is the anticlimactic ending to the book the point? There is no climax to the pursuit of knowledge. show less

The Discoverers is a genial, readable, welcome overview of some of the major scientific discoveries in human history, linked together by theme, and a good candidate for "best book that should have been one of my textbooks in high school but inexplicably wasn't". Boorstin is apparently a generally strong historian, having written several other acclaimed works like the 1974 History Pulitzer winner The Americans, and if that one was anything like this it should be a great read. The Discoverers show more takes a strongly narrative approach to its scope of inquiry, which endeared it to me. It's divided into four main sections: Time, which discusses the inventions of the calendar and clock; The Earth and Seas, which recounts the refinement of mapping, geography, and exploration; Nature, which covers astronomy, medicine, and physics; and Society, which wraps up the modern era as an age where people have studied themselves and their works in unprecedented detail. These general topics are related to the reader through the stories of the explorers and scientists who uncovered new lands and new knowledge, and Boorstin's smooth writing style and talent for both panoramic surveys and detailed explanations should make the content stick in the mind a bit better than the somewhat disjointed style of most textbooks.

I like the way that he treats the "story of progress" as the stories of people, both because he's a great humanist, sensitive to the struggles of people to shrug off constraints of ignorance and see a little farther, and also because that way he's better able to impart just how difficult those struggles were. The overall lesson is that progress is very difficult: people's prejudices - be they the spontaneous generation, geocentrism, the threefold world map - are almost always seemingly reasonable and justifiable by simple inspection, and it takes a lot of deep thinking and hard work to advance the frontiers of knowledge. Boorstin is able to incite both sympathy for the inhabitants of the old worlds and admiration for the pioneers of the new worlds, while returning again and again to a sentiment we would all do well to remember: "I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever." Well said. Here's hoping that more people read this book, both to celebrate the great scientists and adventurers of the past, and keep in mind that spirit of discovery. show less

Naše predstave o svetu u kome živimo i koje smo često skloni da bez rezerve prihvatimo, imaju svoju dugu i neretko burnu predistoriju. Zbog čega je taj svet kakav jeste, koji su to stavovi, dogme, izumi, otkrića, koje su istine ili zablude učinile da on za nas poprimi upravo onakav oblik, i da ga upravo na ovakav način opažamo i shvatamo, pitanja su na koja Borstinova knjiga pokušava najpre da nas navede, a zatim i da nam ponudi odgovore.
Uz živopisnu pozadinu koju čine biografije show more istraživača iz različitih epoha, upoznajemo se ne samo sa velikim i važnim otkrićima, već i sa tim kako je do njih došlo. Imena Kolumba, Balboe, Magelana i Kuka, Paracelzusa, Galena, Verzalija i Harvija nisu samo simboli za najznačajnija otkrića u istoriji sveta; oni na stranicama Borstinove knjige oživljavaju sa svim svojim vrlinama ali i manama, težnjama i strepnjama zbog kojih zauvek ostaju to što jesu. show less

The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin, published in 1985, is a solid, thoroughly researched and well documented series of 82 essays on the history of human discovery. Some of these discoveries are physical, such as the New World or the trade route around Africa. Some of the discoveries are scientific such as the Calculus, the atom, or Evolution.

For me, the book has two aspects that set it well above similar works on scientific history. That is, an exploration of how we discovered things that show more one might not normally think of as a discovery, such as the measurement of Time, or how did the idea of divisions in pre-history into Stone, Bronze and Iton ages develop. How did we start to measure Time? This is a fascinating subject and one in which Boorstin indulges enough space to make a decent foray into the subject.

The other novel aspect of the book is the occasional discussion of "why not them?". Why didn't the Chinese or Islam invent the movable printing press? They had better and more advanced technologies in printing and in paper production long before the west, but it took Gutenberg to invent it. "Why not them" is at least as interesting (if not more) a subject than why Gutenberg did invent it.

Even though 25 years has passed since its publication, the work does not seem to show its age as Boorstin's positions his text in a manner to transcend our current period. Many of these essays will be just as interesting to readers 50 or 100 years from now. show less