A loss

I still remember where I was when I first picked up the book "The Image" by Daniel Boorstin, and I remember the sense of illumination as I read it -- I was young and it made the daily flow of events so much more understandable. In the book, Boorstin describes "pseudo-events," events that are planned and staged so that they will be covered as "news" when, in fact, they are advertising. So, rather than say "watch NASCAR racing," for example, it is better to stage a "racing rally" and cover it as front-page news ("10,000 show up for downtown racing rally"). He identified people famous for being famous -- but no one remembers why they got famous in the first place. Reading the whole book was a like taking a tour of places I had already been to but this time I was enabled to see things I never saw before. I've always felt a sense of gratitude to Boorstin for what I learned from that book and, later, other books he wrote.

He passed away this week at age 89. He entered Harvard at 15, wrote his honors thesis on Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and took Gibbon as a model for good historical writing. He later got a law degree from Yale. He taught history at the University of Chicago for 25 years, directed one of the Smithsonian Museums for a number of years and through it all got up every morning at 4:30 or 5 to write for 2 or 3 hours on his manual typewriter before going to work. He called himself an amateur historian and over 50 years of early-morning writing he authored two dozen books, translated into at least 30 different languages. But it wasn't the number of books he wrote that made him significant, it was the impact they had on those who read them.