Word: boorstins
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...heroes are the uncommon men whom he calls "the Go-Getters"-the tycoons, the inventors, the social scientists, who shaped the real character of American life. These, argues Boorstin, are the genuine "revolutionaries," and the book is studded with their biographies: Willis H. Carrier, who homogenized the country with air conditioning; Chester F. Carlson, the man who doomed the secret by inventing the Xerox system; R.G. Dun, the credit rating pioneer who made Everyman's private life the subject of public record...
...Boorstin's breezy, anecdotal style makes his book a rousing reading experience, the sort of history that tells Americans painlessly but tartly who they really are. Remember streetcars...
They rumble through Boorstin's pages at length twice, once as the begetters of the central city and its department stores, again as the linchpins to the new suburbia. The department stores, too, emerge as a "democratic experience," the first places in the world where the poor as well as the rich could gawk at a vast array of bright new wares. Only occasionally does Boorstin ride a hobbyhorse too far. Obviously infatuated with the cowboy and all his ways, he devotes an entire section to an exhaustive -and nearly exhausting-treatise on the technology of cattle branding...
...section is worth getting through. Beyond it lies Boorstin's often critical commentary on what the Go-Getters really got-and how they got it. A lawyer himself, Boorstin seems bemused at the profession's remarkable good fortune in guiding business through the legal maze of the federal system; in 1968, he reports, lawyers took in $5.2 billion in fees...
Throughout the book runs an undertone of disillusionment. Boorstin hails the photograph and phonograph, but notes how they destroyed the uniqueness of the moment, broadening experience but leveling it. Radio and television multiplied communication, but made it an increasingly private experience. Supermarkets offered the consumer an abundance of choice, and franchises the assurance of at least modest uniform quality, but the touch and smell of food became trapped in paperboard and plastic...