The Discoverers
1983 · 745 pages
The obstacle to discovery was never ignorance but the illusion of knowledge, Boorstin argues, then walks through the clock, the compass and the microscope as victories over what everyone was certain of.
★ 6.6
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Age of Extremes
1914-1991
1994 · 672 pages
The twentieth century runs from 1914 to 1991 in Hobsbawm's account, moving through catastrophe, a golden age of postwar boom, then landslide. No later history of the century has displaced it.
★ 6.5
The Penguin History of the World
2013 · 1280 pages
One volume carries the whole human record from the first stone tools to the present, with the causes always in view: why civilizations rose where they did, and why each gave way.
★ 5.9
A Little History of the World
1936 · 284 pages
History is a bottomless well, Gombrich tells his young reader: drop a burning scrap of paper down it and watch. Forty chapters carry you from the first humans to his own century.
★ 5.2