The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (Paperback)

by Daniel J. Boorstin (Author) "The future has always been the great treasure-house of meaning..." (more)
Key Phrases: seeking spirit, Middle Ages, New Testament, William James (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Renowned historian Daniel J. Boorstin completes the trilogy he began with The Discoverers and The Creators. The first volume covered explorers, scientists, and historians in their quest for raw knowledge, while the second book describes writers, painters, and composers in their pursuit of inspiring art; The Seekers describes people searching for an understanding of human existence--"Man is the asking animal," notes Boorstin. It's a big, bold theme, and although The Seekers is the shortest work in the trilogy, it's still vintage Boorstin: incredibly learned, richly anecdotal, and casually profound. It begins with the prophets of the Holy Land and the philosophers of ancient Greece, continues through the Renaissance, and concludes with the modern era of the social sciences. "In this long quest [for understanding], Western culture has turned from seeking the end or purpose to seeking causes--from the Why to the How," writes Boorstin. That's a neat summary of Western intellectual development over several thousand years. What other author could put it so succinctly? Boorstin is generally stronger with material that is more recent and more secular, but this is an accomplished book and a worthy capstone to an outstanding three-volume effort. --John J. Miller --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
In The Discoverers (1983), Boorstin introduced readers to scientists, explorers, historians and other pursuers of knowledge. Ten years later, The Creators did the same for innovators in art. "We glory in their discoveries and creations," he writes in the introduction to his latest, "But we are all Seekers. We all want to know why." Starting from that perhaps overbroad premise, Boorstin begins with an examination of Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers?those who seek from a higher authority and those who seek from within. From this point on there are rather few religious seekers; instead most are philosophers of systems, of systems for discovering truth (the reason of Descartes, the empiricism of Locke, the individual experience of Kierkegaard) or for describing it (the encyclopedia of Diderot, the cultural cycles of Spengler, Hegel's World-Spirit). Certain subjects seem rather out of place, and chapters like that on H.G. Wells and John Reed, another on Oliver Wendell Holmes and E.O. Wilson; and individual chapters on Samuel Beckett, Lord Acton and Andre Malraux, have the feel of an insatiable polymath's chapbook. There are many movements, many people and many big ideas here, all expounded with Boorstin's characteristic enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge. It's perhaps inevitable that in such a broad survey some simplification would slip in?e.g., identifying 13th-century universities as centers for training gentlemen, rather than for offering professional training in theology, law and medicine. But what Boorstin does so well is bring together many ideas that fertilize and cross-fertilize the reader's imagination and curiosity. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Vintage Books ed edition (October 26, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375704752
• ISBN-13: 978-0375704758
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #74,202 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Boorstin, October 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (Hardcover)

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.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The journey is the reward, July 3, 2003

By	Mark Mills (Glen Rose, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The whole is not the sum of the parts, January 23, 2002

By	mrliteral - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (Hardcover)

This is the final book in the "trilogy" of Boorstin's that started with The Discoverers and continued with The Creators. It is easily the shortest of the three, which is perhaps good, because it also easily the weakest.

Like the other two books, this volume is essentially a collection of short biographies. This time, the people being written about are primarily philosophers. The problem is that the common theme that ties all these people together is elusive; at the end of the book, I was still unclear what the whole book was about; in parts, it is okay, but as a whole, it is not. It is like connecting the dots when the dots are misnumbered or some are missing: either way, you aren't going to get the right picture.

The other problem is that some portions of the book are tedious to read. I think this ties into my first problem; since I had only vague hints at Boorstin's intention with this book, I found it harder to get through. This isn't a mystery novel; the meaning should not be something that is guessed at.

For those who have read the other books in this trilogy, this book will come as a disappointment. I do give it a weak three stars, however, as there are some chapters that are at least interesting and informative. Overall, however, this book is below average.