But, I digress.Van Doren spent the two decades before writing this book as an editor for Encyclopedia Britannica. Ironic that this fate should befall him, as his learning would obviously put to shame the current crop of would-be millionaires so popular on the television today. Van Doren, as you may recall, is the Van Doren who got caught up in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. But that does not really detract from the thesis of the book it is certainly a worthy outline of human history, particularly approached through the lens of intellectual achievement and the advance of knowledge. Charles Van Doren undertook an ambitious project in this book, which according to its cover blurb purports to be 'a compendium of everything that humankind has thought, invented, created, considered, and perfected from the beginning of civilisation into the twenty-first century.'There are, alas, a few things missing, as this book only has a bit over 400 pages.
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