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How long does it take to read The Creators?

Daniel J. Boorstin

The Creators by Daniel J. Boorstin takes about 15 hours 15 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 15 hours 15 minutes

A long haul

First published 1992. 832 pages, about 228,800 words.

31 days (about 5 weeks) at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 25 hours 25 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 15 hours 15 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 9 hours 32 minutes

The page count is the median across 17 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

In this engrossing companion to his bestselling The Discoverers, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings to life more than three thousand years of achievement in the arts. The Discoverers, which has been translated into twenty languages, gave us an epic of the quest to understand the world, from the heavens to the human heart. Now Boorstin puts flesh on the great figures who have created our cultural heritage, from the pyramid builders to Picasso, enriching our world with architecture, painting, sculpture, music, drama, dance, and literature. This is a surprising story from the very beginning. The ancient Hindus and the Buddhists were untroubled by the mystery of Creation. So, too, the Chinese saw history as a series of cycles without beginning or end. And Islam found the very notion of Creation unappealing. But our Judeo-Christian tradition--Moses and Saint Augustine among others--gave us a prophetic vision of Man the Creator in the image of a Creator-God. In this suspenseful narrative brimming with lively biographical incident, we see Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and other great creators deftly placed in the unique circumstances of their times. For Boccaccio the plague offered a challenge to entertain with a hundred still-remembered tales. Brunelleschi designed the elegant dome of the cathedral in Florence to save his proud city the disgrace of an unfinished monument. And Michelangelo's commission to paint the curved, lunetted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel arose from his rivals' efforts to discredit an inexperienced painter with an impossible task. We see, too, how the challenge to Walt Whitman, Frank Lloyd Wright, Isadora Duncan, and others grew out of the experience of their age. Nor were the great creators daunted by any obstacle--not the blindness of a Milton, the impaired vision of a Prescott, Parkman, or Joyce, the deafness of a Beethoven, the asthma of a bedridden Proust, the dreariness of T. S. Eliot's life as a…

Subjects: Arts, Creation, Civilization, History, Civilization, history, Arts, history

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