(Ebook) The Swerve: How The World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt ISBN 9780393064476, 0393064476, B005LW5J9O

(Ebook) The Swerve: How The World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt ISBN 9780393064476, 0393064476, B005LW5J9O

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. 

"The Swerve is one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that's so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind."  -  Maureen Corrigan, NPR

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On The Nature of Things, by Lucretius — a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. 

"There is abundant evidence here of what is Mr Greenblatt’s great and rare gift as a writer: an ability, to borrow a phrase from The Swerve, to feel fully 'the concentrated force of the buried past."  -  The New York Times

"It's a chapter in how we became what we are, how we arrived at the worldview of the present. No one can tell the whole story, but Greenblatt seizes on a crucial pivot, a moment of recovery, of transmission, as amazing as anything in fiction."  -  The Philadelphia Inquirer 

The copying and translation of this ancient book fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.