
Van Doren has distilled the ideology of scientific progress into a neat, short drink that should win him a place on every library shelf.Ĭopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. An avid reader of Popular Mechanics who went to sleep in Peoria, Illinois in 1920 and awoke today with this book in her/his hands would probably find their ideals intact, needing only new technical knowledge and preparation for Van Doren's predicted revolt of intelligent machines. Ultimately, the best knowledge for him is Western scientific knowledge since it is cumulative, meaning that better theories nearly always replace worse ones.

He warns that some good knowledge is unpleasant: we must now control our technology.

The Chinese gave us Confucius, but Van Doren notes their main legacy seems to be good recipes for tyranny. He praises Columbus for giving us "a world well on the way to the unity it experiences today." India is mentioned as the source of the caste system.

Figure out the general gist of a book before you commit to reading it.To gain information more efficiently, first look through the text to see if reading it would be beneficial to learn what you need to know.If we can’t determine what words or sentences are trying to say to us, we can’t gain anything from reading the book.To understand a book, we must understand the words in the book.If When we aren’t reading for fun, we must admit that reading is not a passive task.Learning a certain few tips and tricks for reading can help you absorb more knowledge from books.

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