|
|
REVIEWS: The Swerve
|
|
|
|
NY Times
GoodReads
The Guardian
Book Companion
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction
and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. 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. 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. The copying
and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of
the greatest book-hunter of his age-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.
Characters: 238. Amazon rating: 4 1/2 stars. Genre: Non-Fiction.
|
|
CH3 |
|
National
Museum in Naples. |
4 |
|
Laurentian
Library. |
7 |
|
University
of Bologna. |
|
|
OTHER LINKS:
|
|
|
If you liked The Swerve you may also like other books in our
Non-Fiction Category.
To view more posted books, go to
Book List.
To view books in process, and to suggest new books, go to
Books In Process.
To view additional authors, go to Author List.
|
|