The discoverers Book

If you were going on a yearlong cruise and could take only one book, this might be my recommendation. I cannot imagine where else you could find, in a single volume, such a wealth of history organized so lucidly and written so engagingly. The title might suggest that it is the story of Columbus, Magellan, etc., and in part it is, but it is far more. It describes the step-by-step advances in human knowledge in many areas, as societies began to measure time, became determined to explore and map the earth and seas, sought to catalog nature, encountered the need to record and transmit knowledge, and eventually recognized the importance of excavating and studying their own past. Even discoveries I thought I knew about became, in Boorstin's telling, new and thrilling, because he so vividly explains and recaptures the illusions against which the particular discoverer was contending.

The book is divided into wonderfully concise chapters of about 5-8 pages, and in almost every one of them I became instantly interested in the protagonist, and awed by the courage or brilliance of his discovery. In a good number of them I either found the answer to some question I had always wondered about, or found intriguing discussion of something it had never really occurred to me to wonder about -- such as why there are seven days in a week, when nothing in nature dictates it. In whole or in parts, this book can be read and reread almost endlessly.