Word: boorstin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...publication of many renowned works of 20th century literature in attractive, hardcover volumes, to choose, from an unlimited field of candidates, the 100 best novels written in English since 1900. No big deal--especially since the board is made up of respectable thinkers and writers including Daniel J. Boorstin, A.S. Byatt, Shelby Foote, Edmund Morris, William Styron and Gore Vidal...
...hero--so ran Boorstin's prophecy--was being replaced by the celebrity, and where once our leaders seemed grander versions of ourselves, now they just looked like us on a giant screen. Nowadays, as we read about the purported telephone messages of a sitting President and listen to the future King of England whisper to his mistress, the power of technology not just to dehumanize but to demystify seems 30 times stronger than even Boorstin predicted...
More than a third of a century ago, before anyone had ever heard of videotapes or the World Wide Web or 24-hour TV news stations, Daniel Boorstin, in his uncannily prescient book The Image, described how, as we move deeper into what he called the Graphic Revolution, technology would threaten to diminish us. Ideas, even ideals, would be reduced to the level of images, he argued, and faith itself might be simplified into credulity. "Two centuries ago, when a great man appeared," the historian wrote, "people looked for God's purpose in him; today we look for his press...
Excessive emphasis on method in courses intended for non-specialists is also pedagogically unsound. It is true that substance and method are everywhere intertwined. But what attracts and holds a beginner's interest is substance, not method. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes in his introduction to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that it "was the first extensive work of English literature (and history) that I read and reread. It occupied much of my thought during my university years as an undergraduate." Einstein recalls how he fell in love with mathematics...
...about how they are made. Substance and method are both essential, and Core courses should not ignore method. But substance must come first. If a work of science, history, literature, or art doesn't capture and hold our interest or evoke a strong aesthetic response, as Gibbon did for Boorstin and Euclid for Einstein, why should we care how it was made...