Know your History

Well it’s that time again. After much ado and waiting, I finally finished reading A History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren. It took me a while because of other things I was doing and reading at the same time. I should e done with the requirements for Materials for Automobile Bodies very soon as well. I’m on the verge of starting Cryptonomicon, but that one is going to take a while. The friggin thing is 1168 pages and like 8 point font. It’s insane. I’ll probably have to throw another book in the middle of that too just to break it up. But enough of that rambling, lets get on with the new rambling.

I’ve read a few books in my day, and this is one. Bad joke. I bought this book on sale, and I’m glad. I don’t recommend its purchase, but I do recommend it for reading. That is if you like the history of ideas.

This book should really be a History of Western Knowledge. It’s pretty Eurocentric in nature, but Europe has had one of the largest impacts on knowledge change and dissemination. Some other areas of the word are covered in the beginning, but they fall by the wayside around the time of the Greeks.

The book is interesting because it doesn’t necessarily cover facts so much as it covers how knowledge was created and spread during the different times. The coverage of the past is pretty good and gets you thinking outside of many of the normal ways of looking at the past and past knowledge. It looks at how knowledge changed and therefore changed the way people thought about living and what life should be like. It actually took me a while to get to understand what he was talking about. I’m an engineer and rather exacting in certain things. I had to alter my thinking of the past and past peoples and relationships to begin to understand the ideas at which he was trying to get.

When the book gets to “present” time it gets funny, because the book was first published in 1991. Some of the predictions for the last decade of the 20^th century are rather funny in hind sight. The predictions for the 21^st century are even more peculiar. I have to say I disagree with many of them, but they are excellent conversation starters. In fact I would say that is the biggest draw of the entire book. I want to read this book in a book club of my friends and then discuss it over beers. That would be almost perfect. This book is also an interesting companion to Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. I have a review of that here. The books cover similar events and times in very different ways. That leads to interesting interaction of the ideas, both complimentary and contradictory.

In all it’s an interesting read and a recommended borrowing book for people that like history, knowledge, and thinking. In fact I offer my copy to any of my friends that would like to borrow it. But, don’t bother buying it.