My Dad sent it to me one Christmas around 1983, when it first appeared. This is quite a fine book about the Age of Discovery. Some are unforgivable, but our future discoveries may assuage the pain we feel over them, God willing… and so it goes. The ‘solutions’ of the Discoverers, however, have now opened yet new ethical aporias. But humankind is an inveterate problem-solver. When President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress, the nomination was supported by the Authors League of America but opposed by the American Library Association because Boorstin "was not a library administrator." The Senate confirmed the nomination without debate.īoorstin died in 2004 in Washington, D.C. The work is still often used as a text in American sociology courses. The idea of pseudo-events closely mirrors work later done by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. He goes on to coin the term pseudo-event which describes events or activities that serve little to no purpose other than to be reproduced through advertisements or other forms of publicity.
In The Image, Boorstin describes shifts in American culture-mainly due to advertising-where the reproduction or simulation of an event becomes more important or "real" than the event itself. Within the discipline of social theory, Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image A Guide to Pseudo-events in America is an early description of aspects of American life that were later termed hyperreality and postmodernity. His The Americans The Democratic Experience received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution. He was a lawyer and a university professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years.
He graduated with highest honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD at Yale University. He graduated from Tulsa's Central High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the age of 15. He was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress from 1975 until 1987. Daniel Joseph Boorstin was a historian, professor, attorney, and writer.
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