Rating: 
Summary: liberal and communist ideology
Review: A Valuable introduction to some of the foundations of liberal and communist ideology.
Rating:
Summary: Just not enough
Review: After reading The Discoverers and The Creators, The Seekers may disappoint you with its lack of depth. What's written is a joy to consume (Mr. Boorstin has a tremendous may with the English language), but the deep analysis found in the first two installments of the trilogy is absent here. How surprising, considering Mr. Boorstin's obvious intellect and professed interest in the subject! To put it quite simply, I was left wanting more. I don't regret buying the book, but I do wish the author had spent more time writing it.
Rating: 
Summary: The journey is the reward
Review: Boorstin is a master story teller. I felt like I was sitting with a friend by a comfortable fire, being challenged to think, but regularly regaled with irony, satire and laughter. The motto of the book might be "The road is always better than the end." Another theme is that seeking brings us together, that fulfills us. The people who think they have found the final answer are the menace to our humanity, because there is no answer to find. Of course, this is the puzzle. How can one maintain their interest in 'seeking' if they realize the danger of 'finding'? Boorstin doesn't provide simple answers. Boorstin starts with the Biblical conversations with God recorded by the Jewish tradition. To summarize these discussion, Boorstin spends a fair amount of time with the story of Job and the omnipresent fact that bad things happen to innocent people. He concludes that the ancient Hebrews taught their children that no one knows what God knows, so the innocent must push on, must keep the faith. With this said, he poses the same question (do you know what God knows?) to the Greek tradition, starting with Socrates. Socrates became famous for demonstrating much the same point, interviewing those who claim to know truth, then proving their knowledge was an illusion. Plato, Socrates admirer and evangelist, tried to answer Socrates with his utopian Republic. In Plato's view, no one but philosophers knew the 'truth.' Showing no respect for his elders, Aristotle, a student of Socrates and Plato, chose something of a middle road: scientists know a few things that are true. In this triad of forceful personalities, the rest of the book finds it's structure. Following Gibbon's outline of history, Boorstin then builds a bridge (Part II) between the ancient and modern world, quickly reviewing 1000 years of dialog between empiricists (the scientists who know at least one thing) and fundamentalists (those that know what God knows). This bridge involves Greek, then Christian evangelists, scholars and reformers until about 1500, when Hobbes, St. Thomas More and Descartes renew the Socratic debate. Boorstin makes a case for the pivotal role Descartes plays, bridging the intuition and empiricist in his famous 'I think therefore I [know I] exist'. Descartes is followed by the evangelists of this synthesis: Voltaire (the civilized know) and Rousseau (the uncivilized know). The section on Rousseau is hilarious and well worth the price of the book (The section on Kirkegaard is equally funny.) Avoiding the temptation to side with any particular advocate, Part III describes a variety of utopian enthusiasts. For a while, I thought the title should have been the 'utopians'. In these utopias, the old question about "God allowing bad thing to happen to innocent people" is solved by banishing suffering. In Utopia, society is so perfected that nothing can upset the universal joy. The luminaries for this post 1800 era include Marx (historians know how to accomplish this), Kierkegaard (we will regret knowing), Lord Acton (joy through revolutionary discontinuities) and William James (knowledge is a river, impossible to divide). The last three personalities Boorstin mentions, Malraux, Bergson and Einstein seem to be Boorstin's personal favorites. They were all active during and after World War I & II and probably had an impact on his life. Only Voltaire gets similar approval. Boorstin's favorable review of materialists like Voltaire, Marx and Malraux was a bit hard to swallow.. . He ignores the Scottish Enlightenment and Hume, where his hero Voltaire got the ideas which made him famous. Additionally, he tersely dismisses the contributions of Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian philosophers, all of whom greatly enriched Europe. It would have been better to ignore the subject. But, the story telling is wonderful. Maybe a logical 'whole' isn't all that important.
Rating: 
Summary: Hullo? There's life outside the library
Review: Boorstin is not an original thinker, but a representative of a new disturbing intellectual trend. Instead of presenting us with his own original thoughts, he has kneaded together a dough of old ideas and philosophers that does not rise because it lacks the catalyst of imagination. Boorstin and his ilk are the literary equivalent of the disco dub machine, endlessly reworking old melodies to a new beat that sounds like all the other new beats.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful introduction to Western philosophy
Review: Boorstin's research and meticulous care have made this a classic introduction to Western ways of thinking. Although his preference for the atheist philosophy of Bertrand Russell is noticeable, Boorstin thankfully does not take any specific philosophical position. Dogma, especially repressive dogma, is the only position which is cast negatively. Toleration is essential in any history of ideas, especially an introductory history of philosophy such as this, and this toleration is maintained quite well in The Seekers. In addition, biographical details are presented in such a way that they add to the meaning of the documentation of the ideas without explaining the ideas away as the results of the life experiences detailed. Since reading this book, I have begun to study philosophy on a deeper level, and have found that Boorstin slightly misinterprets Kierkegaard's book Either/Or (the first part of Either/Or, which Mr. Boorstin quotes extensively, is Kierkegaard's view of the aesthetic life, which Kierkegaard disapproves of; but Boorstin uses these quotations to represent the substance of Kierkegaard's philosophy). There may be similar errors which I have not noticed in the explanations of the ideas of other philosophers whom I have not studied extensively, but overall this is an excellent book and I would definitely recommend it to all.
Rating:
Summary: Seeking the Elusive Makes A Grand Hunt
Review: Boorstin's third book of his trilogy follows a chronological format on man's search for the reasons of life. "We are all seekers," he writes. "We all want to know why." The book follows three grand epics of seeking. The first begins with Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers. The former seeking from a higher authority, and the latter seeking from within. He moves on to the formation of communal experiences of the early church and the Reformation. The last epic is the age of the social sciences. Many stories of many exceptional men are told: their complexities, their understanding of past seekers, and their mistakes made mostly due to being ruled by history. From the prophets and matchless Grecian trilogy seeking understanding of man's place; to Thomas Moore and Machiavelli pursuing the civil, liberal spirit; to Marx, Spengler, Emerson and Einstein who hone in on their own specialized areas of seeking, The Seekers captures the meaning of its namesake: the ever-elusive definition of life. If the book has a short-coming, it would be Boorstin's inability to retrieve and contain the many more Seekers of modern thought. However, to include modern-day theorists, philosophers and other seekers would add chapters, getting us nowhere closer to our most coveted definition.
Rating:
Summary: liberal and communist ideology
Review: Despite Boorstin's obvious admiration of and preference for the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, the book maintains a neutral position in presenting ideas. Information about the background and lives of the various thinkers is presented in a way which adds to the exposition of the ideas rather than detracting via the all-too-common habit of using such information to try to explain the ideas away as only products of the situation of their conception. All in all, this is a good and very accessible introduction to a score of Western philosophers.
Rating: 
Summary: An Esoteric Sound Bite
Review: Frankly, to attempt to present even an admittedly brief history of seekers like this volume is nearly blasphemous. This is the fast-foot, USA Today version of the history of seekers. This was not a whetting of the appetite for more--this was inappropriate. This is like the Reader's Digest Version of the Ring of the Nibelungen or the Eroica Symphony. To hear only the first minute of the first movement is less than a insight. It is, like this book, a meaninglless waste of time. I can find little good to say of this supeficial survey. In its attempt to "accessibility," it presents unsatisfying fluff. Some things, i.e., the history of thought, must not be reduced to bathroom reading. With his other more ample volumes, what happened here? Did the author run out of time? This is consumerism at its worst.
Rating:
Summary: Found: A disappointment
Review: Having enjoyed "The Discoverers" and then a bit disappointed with "The Creators," my expectations for "The Seekers" were mixed. I was hoping to read a description of the historical development of philosophic ideas. Unfortunately, I found "The Seekers" to be a disappointment. It is not clear for whom this book is intended. Philosophic schools, historical and social trends, and the people who sought truth are described in brief and somewhat disconnected brush-strokes. Most disappointing is the apparent inability of the author to shed a narrow focus on people and their times (often with idiosyncratic and not always relevant pieces of information thrown in) and not place ideas and works in a broader social and cultural context. Without other knowledge, one would have a difficult time understanding the importance, and particularly the historical consequences, of the ideas that are described.
Rating:
Summary: Vintage Boorstin
Review: Having read (all of) "The Americans", "The Discoverers", and (part of) "The Creators", I picked up "The Seekers" when and where I first saw it (which happened to be at the Library of Congress, which doesn't seem inappropriate). On a subsequent trip, I took it and several other books to pass the airplane hours. I didn't open the other books, and I finished "The Seekers". Having enjoyed it immensely, I logged on to amazon.com to see what other readers had thought (reading is a social habit, like drinking, and not to be done alone). I was quite surprised to find that not every reader had enjoyed it as much as I. I would agree that its sparse style is different from his longer books, and I would admit that it is Euro-centeric (as advertised). That having been said, I would also say that the careful selection of and brief presentation of the material was masterful. This "brief history of western seeking" will, I believe, provide me with a roadmap that will inform my reading selections for years to come.
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