Volume 31, Number 8 · May 10, 1984
Excelsior!
By Keith Thomas
The Discoverers
by Daniel J. Boorstin
Random House, 745 pp., $25.00
Daniel Boorstin became Librarian of Congress in 1975. As professor of American history at the University of Chicago and subsequently as director of the National Museum of History and Technology at Washington, he had established a reputation as the author of The Americans, a prize-winning trilogy painted on a broad canvas and with wide popular appeal. Since becoming librarian, he has had to confine his writing to the hours before breakfast, but this has not prevented him from completing a large and even more ambitious work which is clearly destined for the same commercial success. The Discoverers is written with great verve. It is founded on a vast amount of reading and it contains much entertaining material. In microcosm (if that is the word for a work of more than seven hundred pages) it reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of the kind of history book that is intended from the outset to reach a mass market.
Review, 3259 words
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