Word: boorstins
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...Boorstin boldly announces, at the launching of The Discoverers, that he plans to ignore all the obvious territory: politics, finance, culture, "the waging of wars, the rise and fall of empires." That leaves him free to concentrate on one thematic concept: "mankind's need to know-to know what is out there." The exploration starts with a basic aspect of history, time itself. Who first thought of measuring the year, or dividing it into months and weeks? The Romans decreed a week of eight days and a day of twelve hours, but the day itself was measured solely...
...DISCOVERERS by Daniel J. Boorstin; Random House...
Historian Daniel Boorstin, a Rhodes scholar with degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge as well as both Harvard and Yale, and the Librarian of Congress since 1975, knows all those recondite facts and more. Many more. He also knows how to put them to good use. Having gambled in the 1950s that he could retell the whole American experience in his three-volume The Americans, a wager that eventually won him a Pulitzer Prize, Boorstin is now attempting an even riskier gamble: that he can find a new way to retell the whole history of the world in 745 pages...
Only when time could be precisely measured could space be systematically explored. From the 14th century clock came the 15th century navigational instruments that could guide mariners across an uncharted ocean. Yet history is only occasionally that logical, as Boorstin delights in pointing out, for much of it derives from blunders and accidents. Bartholomeu Dias' maps all showed that there was no ocean route around Africa. It was only after he had been driven off course by a storm in February of 1488 that he found he had somehow rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and that there...
...Boorstin clearly relishes such tales, not only about notable discoverers like Columbus and Magellan but also about the half-forgotten Cheng Ho, a Chinese eunuch who set forth in the 15th century with a gigantic fleet of more than 300 vessels and nearly 40,000 men. Exploring as far as Zanzibar, Chêng Ho brought back to the imperial zoo its first giraffe, which the Chinese were convinced was a unicorn, whose horn was said to provide the most powerful of aphrodisiacs...