The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (National Book Award - Nonfiction)
“The Swerveis one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that's so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind.” (NPR)“Pleasure may or may not be the true end of life, but for book lovers, few experiences can match the intellectual-aesthetic enjoyment delivered by a well-wrought book. In the world of serious nonfiction, Stephen Greenblatt is a pleasure maker without peer.” (Newsday)“A fascinating, intelligent look at what may well be the most historically resonant book-hunt of all time.” (Booklist)“Can a poem change the world? Harvard professor and bestselling Shakespeare biographer Greenblatt ably shows in this mesmerizing intellectual history that it can. A richly entertaining read about a radical ancient Roman text that shook Renaissance Europe and inspired shockingly modern ideas (like the atom) that still reverberate today.” (Newsweek)“It's fascinating to watch Greenblatt trace the dissemination of these ideas through 15th-century Europe and beyond, thanks in good part to Bracciolini's recovery of Lucretius' poem.” (Salon.com)“[The Swerve] is thrilling, suspenseful tale that left this reader inspired and full of questions about the ongoing project known as human civilization.” (Boston Globe)“More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian.” (starred review - Kirkus Reviews)“The ideas inThe Swerveare tucked, cannily, inside a quest narrative. The book relates the story of Poggio Bracciolini, the former apostolic secretary to several popes, who became perhaps the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His most significant find, located in a German monastery, was a copy of Lucretius’On the Nature of Things, which had been lost to history for more than a thousand years. Its survival and re-emergence into the world, Mr. Greenblatt suggests, was a kind of secular miracle.Approaching Lucretius through Bracciolini was an ingenious idea. It allows Mr. Greenblatt to take some worthwhile detours: through the history of book collecting, and paper making, and libraries, and penmanship, and monks and their almost sexual mania for making copies of things.The details that Mr. Greenblatt supplies throughoutThe Swerveare tangy and exact. He describes how one of the earliest versions of a fluid for repairing mistakes on a manuscript — Whiteout 101 — was a mixture of milk, cheese and lime. He observes the hilarious complaints that overworked monks, their hands cramped from writing, sometimes added to the margins of the texts they were copying:'The parchment is hairy'; 'Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text'; 'Thank God, it will soon be dark'; 'Now I’ve written the whole thing. For Christ’s sake give me a drink.'On the Nature of Thingswas filled with, to Christian eyes, scandalous ideas. It argues eloquently, Mr. Greenblatt writes, that 'there is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design.' Religious fear, Lucretius thought, long before there was a Christopher Hitchens, warps human life.There is abundant evidence here of what is Mr. Greenblatt’s great and rare gift as a writer: an ability, to borrow a phrase fromThe Swerve, to feel fully 'the concentrated force of the buried past.'” (New York Times)“In this outstandingly constructed assessment of the birth of philosophical modernity, renowned Shakespeare scholar Greenblatt deftly transports reader to the dawn of the Renaissance...Readers from across the humanities will find this enthralling account irresistible.” (starred review - Library Journal)“Every tale of the preservation of intellectual history should be as rich and satisfying as Stephen Greenblatt's history of the reclamation and acclamation of Lucretius's De rerum natura from obscurity.” (John McFarland - Shelf Awareness)“In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth.” (starred review - Publishers Weekly)“The Swerveis one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that's so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind.” (Maureen Corrigan - WHYY-FM/Fresh Air)“ButSwerveis an intense, emotional telling of a true story, one with much at stake for all of us. And the further you read, the more astonishing it becomes. 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.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)“InThe Swerve, the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt investigates why [Lucretius' ] book nearly dies, how it was saved and what its rescue means to us.” (Sarah Bakewell - New York Times Book Reivew)