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Summary: One of the Best Books I Have Ever Read
Review: I was moved to write this as I learned of Daniel Boorstin's death. While he is gone, his book, "The Discoverers" will be with us for many years as a classic. I have been in both multi-national and venture environments for thirty years, bringing pioneering advanced medical technologies to the global marketplace. When I stumbled onto "The Discoverers" in 1987, I could not put it down. This is a must book for anyone involved in the process of discovery. Boorstin clearly shows that discovery is the adventure of discovering a fundamental truth... While the earth has always been round and bacteria have been here longer than mankind, our understanding of fundamental 'truths' like these took years to discover. Money, prestige, power, suppressed independent thinking, and laziness all combined to create a 'group think,' a status quo, that was difficult to change. Boorstin shows how 'group think' worked against the acceptance of new ideas, and the eventual discovery of truth. Those who are involved in discovery will recognize that these same obstacles stand in our way today. I have purchased 50+ copies since I bought my first copy. I have given them as gifts to others who have dedicated their lives as entreprenuers, scientists, and/or venture capitalists in an effort to creating a better world. This is a book that tells their story and why they must not give up.
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Summary: Wow, the stuff you never learned in school
Review: I liked this work a little bit better than the Creators, even though I am an artist and reader, I guess it's the calling of the sea, the forests, the mountains.
Just imagine being alive when people had no idea that the Pacific ocean existed or believing that nobody could live below the Equator, such "Anti-Pods" couldn't be real...
This work, like the former, really got me excited about history in general and lead me to read other works, say like "Longitude".
It's one weakness is that it often times reads like a textbook, but it's easy enough to skip parts that are of no interest and get to stuff that moves you.
I imagined many great movies being made from some of these stories, I hope Hollywood script writers find this book and give us some real interesting historical flicks.
My favorite story? The guy that finds the lost city of Troy, wow, what a great and inspirational bit of history.
If you're interested in ships, maps, the discovery of lands, oceans, lost cities and new worlds, you'll enjoy this work, highly recommended.
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Summary: Sometimes fascinating, sometimes not.
Review: In my quest to learn more about world history, I bought this book as a starting place. An enormous amount of work must have gone into this (and his other history books), and while I definitely found most of the reading very engaging, there were some chapters that became quite a chore to get through. All in all I came away with a better understanding of historical figures whose names I'd only heard in passing, but who I now understand to have had a significant role in the world's major and not-so-major discoveries. I intend to try another in his series, perhaps "The Creators".
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Summary: A PRECIOUS DISCOVERY
Review: A truly wonderful book. One that should be used as a textbook in History in high school. Easily readable, it takes the reader on a voyage of far reaching proportions. What is it that makes this book so pleasurable and instructive? A fresh approach to the evolution of knowledge and science as experienced historically by the pioneers. The exploration in retrospective of the discovery of the concept of time and the clock, the compass, the telescope, the microscope and the evolutionary description of the knowledge that mankind acquired through these instruments and the bold steps of the pioneers that wondered around the seas, the cosmos, the mind, etc.. Why is it that modern culture, the different cultures and science are the way they are ? You will find a lot of answers about how this came to happen in the book by the former Librarian of Congress and senior historian of the Smithsonian Institution.
After I read this book, the promise made in the Washington Post Book World's review to it, I found fulfilled: "few indeed will be the readers who do not themselves become discoverers....." This book is one of the most outstanding discoveries that I made in my quest for knowledge. You must not overlook it.
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Summary: Popular History in the best sense of the term
Review: Daniel Boorstin's Discoverers is a delight to read. Its sweeping theme is humanity's discovery of the natural and social world we inhabit. There are major sections that deal with the discovery of the calendar and the invention of the clock; the geographical discoveries of the 15th to 18th centuries; the natural world of astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology; and the social world of historiography and economics. An approach of this sort can't help but be anecdotal which might offend the sensibilities of many professional historians. Yet, for educated laymen (and those historians who recognize the importance of well written synthesis and popularization) the anecdotes are valuable illustrations of his theme-- and great fun to read. I learned much from this book: details of the lives and work of such luminaries and Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus and Adam Smith; also of the lives of lesser known discoverers such as Aldus Manutius, Amerigo Vespucci and the Chinese explorer Cheng Ho. His bibliographic essay at the end is an excellent resource for further reading. I look forward to reading The Creators and The Seekers, the next two books in the trilogy.
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Summary: One of the great big history books.
Review: Being a fan of history I can be very thankful to my friend for recommending this book for me. Here in 650 compact pages is basically the entire history of discovery. From the invention of time to the innovations in agriculture; from voyages of the Europeans to 'new worlds' to the fifteenth century Chinese voyages to Africa; from the discoveries of the mind and anatomy to the discoveries of political and economic thought (Adam Smith, Karl Marx, etc.) It is all in this book. Boorstin uses an exhaustive collection of research to tell the stories of discovery in a very lucid, almost novel-like, style that proves engaging to the very last page. His tellings of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and Captain Cook are some of the best parts. But with this being the seventieth review of this book, I doubt there is much more I can offer in summary that has not already been alluded to; but there is one bit of insight I would like to point out. This book is apolitical. The one-hundred or so pages dedicated to the voyages of discovery conducted by Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries are told purely from a standpoint of facts and discoveries. For example: the innovations in map making; new sailing techniques; and the overall impact on social thinking in Europe. Readers looking for any input on the effects of discovery on the native populations of America and elsewhere will have to in turn look elsewhere. The same thinking applies to new political thoughts such as the French Revolution and Marxism: just the facts and the reasons. It is a fun to read factual primer. Read it with that in mind and it is one of the best books on history in recent memory.
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Summary: Intellectual History on a Grand Scale
Review: Boorstin surveys the development of many of the key aspects of modern life that are so easy to take for granted (time, anatomy, geography, etc.). His book is incredibly well researched and well-written. While some of his conclusions are controversial, I definitely learned many interesting things.
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Summary: The Discoverers
Review: Fine service from Woodward Books...as usual. Words can't describe it's value! I've ordered an extra copy for my brother...nuff said.
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Summary: A wonderful adventure
Review: I agree with other reviewers here who say that this book should be used in classes, instead of the boring, stiff and uninformative bricks we are given in school. Boorstin, an erudite man if there is one, has a unique skill to deliver complex stories in a most readable and interesting way, and probably the secret lies in that he gives us the human dimension. His book is centered on the persons who made all these discoveries, not on the discoveries themselves, and that makes it all the more appealing. I had read his book "The Creators" (another must-read focused on art) and I think the same element is present. In "The Discoverers", Boorstin takes us by the hand and guides us through the history of Man's search for knowledge. And it is a romp. The cast of characters is as varied as humanity itself, from crazy madmen to admirable heroes of knowledge. Among the ones I remember best: Galileo was a great guy, I would have loved to meet him; Newton not, he was not a nice guy (and I couldn't understand any of his thoughts anyway); Paracelsus was a total whacko; Columbus was admirable in his obstination; Linnaeus was great too; but the guy who discovered metabolism was the craziest of them all. Just imagine a guy weighing his body before and after meals, and then weighing... ugh, his excrements to measure the difference. Thank God somebody did it, but it sounds awful. Read this book and you will learn a lot more than in three years of school.
Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive, Interesting and Dry
Review: This book tells the story of mankind's scientific heroes throughout the ages. It focuses mainly on renaissance age discoveries and inventions, and is mostly (but not completely) Eurocentric. Daniel Boorstin has obviously put an amazing amount of time and effort into this comprehensive book. The result is over 700 pages of tightly spaced text that cover everything from geography, to anthropology, to economics, and all the way to physics and chemistry. The book's strengths are also its weaknesses. "The Discoverers" is as comprehensive as a doctoral dissertation, and often reads like one. Latin words and phrases are liberally sprayed throughout the text, and at times I felt as if Boorstin was intentionally trying to use the most obscure terms just for the fun of it. I also found the text and the narration to be mostly dry. This book is not an easy read. I am an avid fan of scientific history books. I enjoyed the awe inspiring scope of this work, and its ability to illustrate the connections and interactions between scientists and their peers, and to show how discoveries and inventions were often based on earlier works. However, I felt that this format does not allow for the proper exploration of each topic. For example, the amazing discoveries of Faraday and Maxwell, are together told in only 4 pages... The bottom line is that "The Discoverers" is not easy to read, and while it gives a tantalizing glimpse into a large number of topics, each of these topics is only briefly discussed. However, the sheer scope of the book gives the reader a fascinating bird's eye view of man's struggle to understand his world.
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