Reviews for The discoverers

The average rating for The discoverers based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-30 00:00:00 Gerald Barnes This is quite a fine book about the Age of Discovery. My Dad sent it to me one Christmas around 1983, when it first appeared. He had come to understand, I think, that in my own dumb way I was a SEEKER rather than a DOER - and so he wanted to feed my heuristic seeking. So I could find my answers. All well and good - and it is a superb and factual book - but I wasn't looking for FACTS. I was seeking answers to my own persistent questions. At that time, a middle manager, I didn't fit into a management mold. I was a dreamer. And my questions were many. How can I be accepted for myself? What can I do to show my coworkers that my own way was viable? And, if the answers remained negative - and their brick wall to my questioning persisted - how can I change myself? Of course, the only really constructive question of those three was the last. I had to change - by finding a Bigger Container for my questions - and, once that container was reified, fit INTO that larger mold in my everyday actions. And that's exactly what happened. I needed more elbow room - as do all we present or former nine-to-fivers - real room to FREELY BE A REAL PERSON. I found that elbow room in my growing compassion and faith, having visualized those concrete options in meditation as the only viable ones. I had to be myself and not WORRY what others thought. But I HAD to also be a caring, hopeful, positive person. And, you know, if you dream Real Dreams you can make them happen. Reification is Key. Now, of course, this whole story for me is ancient history... But after joining GR in 2017 I saw legions of younger folks wrestling with similar problems. Problems of Identity and Character; questions about finding real Meaning in our Life and Putting it to Work for Ourself. So I decided to join in & add my two cents' worth - In your dreams and your reading you have the key. And you know you CAN find the answers you're looking for. You're fully armed: And NOW, unlike the historical period of The Discoverers - Your own Discoveries will never end.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-26 00:00:00 Robert Stansell 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.