The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (Knowledge Series Book 1)

By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller. Amazon.com Review Historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings his customary depth and range to this compelling book on Western art, taking on everything from European megaliths (Stonehenge, for example) to Benjamin Franklin's autobiography ("the first American addition to world literature"). Boorstin does not aim at being comprehensive--he much prefers to linger over certain "heroes of the imagination" as he surveys human accomplishment in the fields of architecture, music, painting, sculpting, and writing--yet The Creators certainly feels comprehensive, as Boorstin carefully places everything he describes within a grand tradition of aesthetic achievement. Boorstin knows that good history demands good writing, and his prose makes this big book easy to absorb. "This is a story," he writes, "of how creators in all the arts have enlarged, embellished, fantasized, and filigreed our experience"--an apt description of the role art plays in our life and an equally apt description of the way Boorstin interprets it for readers. ( The Creators also is the second volume of a trilogy that starts with The Discoverers and concludes with The Seekers , although none of these books requires any knowledge of the others.) --John J. Miller From Publishers Weekly In an ambitious companion volume to The Discoverers, Boorstin undertakes an interpretative history of creativity in Western civilization encompassing all the arts. Creativity, he suggests, is a relatively recent phenomenon with Judeo-Christian roots: the Jews' covenant with Yahweh "sealed . . . man's capacity to imitate God as a creator," and Christianity, by turning our gaze to the future, "played a leading role in the discovery of our powers to create." In the eminent historian's Eurocentric scenario, the Buddha "aimed at Un-Creation" and intimated the existence of a supreme power who was "no model for man the creator." Likewise, Boorstin presents Islamic religion as "the inhibitor of the arts," and his chapter-length forays into Chinese painting and Japanese architecture are unsatisfying, leaving the impression that the truly great creative endeavors are the province of the West. Nevertheless, this is an enormously stimulating volume, an epic work of immeasurable riches. Boorstin contemplates architects' attempts to conquer time and outlast the brief span of human life through prehistoric megaliths, Egypt's pyramids, Greek temples, the Roman Pantheon and modern-day skyscrapers. He offers wonderfully attuned readings of varied versions of the human comedy from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Balzac. Modern writers, he asserts, created the self by probing "the wilderness within," as chapters here on Melville, Dostoyevski, Kafka, Joyce and Virginia Woolf attest. Highly opinionated and quirky, Boorstin says virtually nothing about Mozart's unique triumphs of the spirit, yet he exalts Beethoven as a "prophet and pioneer." Packed with shrewd, pithy judgments and entertaining biographical profiles of Dante, Da Vinci, Goethe, Ben Franklin, Picasso and dozens more, this eloquent, remarkable synthesis sets the achievements of individual creative geniuses into a coherent narrative framework of humanity's advance from darkness and ignorance. First serial to U.S. News & World Report; BOMC main selection. (Sept.) . Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. ϡ쯦랠

An original history of man's greatest adventure: his search to discover the world around him.

Publishers Weekly

In Boorstin's 1983 bestseller The Discoverers , the achievements of Galileo, Columbus, Darwin, Gutenberg and Freud emerged as upwellings of creativity and courage, ingenious acts of revolt against ingrained habit. This richly illustrated two-volume edition reveals the world as known to the discovers themselves. We see the tools of discovery--Egyptian obelisks, early clocks, Leeuwenhoek's microscope, Mercator's maps, botanical drawings from James Cook's voyages--and glimpse the social, cultural and political background, made concrete in 550 pictures including paintings, sculpture, engravings and architecture. A photograph of 15th-century cast bronze type from Korea underscores an Eastern invention that could have changed the course of printing, perhaps of science and culture. In a feast for the mind and eye, itself a delightful adventure in discovery, Boorstin, librarian of Congress emeritus, profiles--and places in context--scores of innovators who broke with dogma and tradition. (Nov.)

By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller. #160; Even as he tells the stories of such individual creators as Homer, Joyce, Giotto, Picasso, Handel, Wagner, and Virginia Woolf, Boorstin assembles them into a grand mosaic of aesthetic and intellectual invention.#160; In the process he tells us not only how great art (and great architecture and philosophy) is created, but where it comes from and how it has shaped and mirrored societies from Vedic India to the twentieth-century United States Governor William Bradford, An Eyewitness, Reported The Landing Of The Mayflower Passengers On The American Shore In Mid-november 1620. Never Had A Promised Land Looked More Unpromising. But Within A Century And A Half -- Even Before The American Revolution -- This Forbidding Scene Had Become One Of The More Civill Parts Of The World. The Large Outlines Of A New Civilization Had Been Drawn. How Did It Happen? V. 1. The Colonial Experience -- V. 2. The National Experience -- V. 3. The Democratic Experience. By Daniel J. Boorstin. The First Volume Of The Author's Trilogy; The Second Of Which Is The Americans, The National Experience; And The Third Of Which Is The Americans, The Democratic Experience. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. In this provocative new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel J. Boorstin explores the essential "hidden history" of the American experience that is overlooked by most historians. In twenty-four essays -- divided into five sections, "The Quest for History," "A By-Product Nation," "The Rhetoric of Democracy," "Unsung Experiments," and "The Momentum of Technology" -- Daniel J. Boorstin examines significant rhythms, patterns, and institutions of everyday American from his intimate portraits of such legendary figures as Paul Revere, Abigail Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, to more expansive discussions of historical phenomena, such as the Therapy of Distance and the Law of Survival of the Unread. First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of pseudo-eventsevents such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reportedand the contemporary definition of celebrity as a person who is known for his well-knownness. Since then Daniel J. Boorstins prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths. Cover design by Matt Dorfman. An original history of man's greatest adventure: his search to discover the world around him. In the compendious history, Boorstin not only traces man's insatiable need to know, but also the obstacles to discovery and the illusion that knowledge can also put in our way. Covering time, the earth and the seas, nature and society, he gathers and analyzes stories of the man's profound quest to understand his world and the cosmos. "This second volume in "The Americans" trilogy deals with the crucial period of American history from the Revolution to the Civil War. Here we meet the people who shaped, and were shaped by, the American experience{u2014}the versatile New Englanders, the Transients and the Boosters. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize."-- Amazon.ca The nation was beginning not at one time or place, but again and again, under men's very eyes. Americans were forming new communities and reforming old communities all over the world expanse of the western world. Explores problems of community and the search for a national identity. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize "Mr. Boorstin tells the story of the invention of a new democratic culture and the reorientation of the national character through countless little revolutions in economy, technology, and social rearrangements. Illuminated by reflections that are original, judicious and sagacious." [by] Daniel J. Boorstin. Originally Published: New York : Random House, 1973. Final Volume In A Trilogy, The First Of Which Is The Author's The Americans: The Colonial Experience, And The Second Of Which Is His The Americans: The National Experience. Bibliography: P. 605-682. Chronicles the history of the arts and includes biographies of important figures ranging from Homer to Stravinsky incorporated into a mosaic of creativity that spans three thousand years Winner of the Bancroft Prize In this brilliantly original book, written for the general reader, the American past becomes richly meaningful to the present. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A study of the last 100 years of American history.