Word: boorstins
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...HERO," writes Daniel J. Boorstin '34 "is Man the Discoverer." His discoverer-heroes are bold seafarers and careful clockmakers; they are census-takers and historians. Their daring feats to invent clocks and maps and dictionaries that light our way through the night of ignorance...
...Discoverers is itself a heroic book. It is a history of all mankind of what Boorstin calls "mankind's need to know." Such a history leaps the barricades of class and race and nation to show the awakening of our collective intelligence. It affirms the powers of discovery to build in the face of man's powers to destroy. Instead of the crossbow or the cannon. Boorstin tells of the printing press, the telescope, and the microscope...
...Boorstin surveys the world through both telescope and microscope. His narrative zooms from panoramic vistas to richly textured details. Only the great French historian Femand Braudel has so well spliced together the grand sweep of history with snapshots of particular events, as in his series on The Structures of Everyday Life...
...prefer the particular to the universal, the sobering fact to the examinating myth, required both courage and self-denial," Boorstin praises Herodotus and Thucydides, the pathbreaking Greek historians. He demonstrates such courage and self-denial: The Discoverers is chock-full of particulars and laced with sobering facts. We see how the botanist Linnaeus originated the idea of species by looking at the sex organs of plants (and how he inspired Charles Darwin's grandfather to write lyric poems about plants' amours). We learn how fastidious anatomists preserved for centuries their ignorance about the true form of the human body...
...rather than the adventuresome explorer, it is the meticulous instrument-maker who serves as Boorstin's model. His narrative is precise, detailed, and accurate, with only a few minor errors. This is only fitting, indeed, the theme of The Discoverers is "the conquest of common sense" by precise and accurate measurement...