A History of Knowledge

Why it’s on the list: Charles Van Doren — Mortimer Adler’s collaborator on How to Read a Book and the Great Books apparatus — compresses the story of Western knowing into one volume: what the ancients knew, what the Middle Ages kept and lost, how the scientific revolution changed the method of knowing, and where knowledge might go next.

Where I heard about it

• Spotted at Pioneer Book, Provo — December 2017 (Books photo album)

• Spotted at Pioneer Book, Provo — May 2024 (Books photo album)

• Spotted at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, Beaverton — January 2026 (Books photo album)

• Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography, in the section on the history of human civilization, where it serves as the one-volume orientation before the specialist histories. He lists the 1992 Ballantine printing.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Charles Van Doren — the author.
• Knowledge — the subject, taken as a historical object rather than a state.