Stephen Greenblatt

How the World Became Modern

The Swerve

How the Renaissance Began

Swerve

Hannah VG

Nick Gracilla

My favorite book of the year! A gripping story of how the last surviving manuscript of a classical Roman poem, The Nature of Things, by Lucretius, survives the ravages of time, politics, and the Catholic Church, is quietly hand copied over the ages, and serves as a foundation of inspiration to the Renaissance and modernity. Fascinating detours into cursive handwriting, the nature of scrolls, manuscripts, and codici, torture and political murder of the inquisition, and the not so enlightened life in monasteries. A must read.

Nelson Zagalo

“The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” é um livro de divulgação científica centrado na teoria dos estudos literários que defende a obra “Da Natureza das Coisas”, de Lucrécio, como um dos principais motores do período da Renascença e consequentemente da Ciência, apontando o poema como pilar da criação do mundo moderno. O poema de Lucrécio foi publicado por volta de 55 a.C, sendo que a razão pela qual se sugere esta relação com o renascentismo tem que ver com o facto de ter praticamente desaparecido durante toda a Idade Média, tendo sido apenas recuperado em 1417 por Poggio Bracciolini, num mosteiro alemão, a partir do qual se fariam as cópias que o trariam até nós. Sendo um livro de divulgação, Stephen Greenblatt escolhe como foco exatamente Bracciolini, e toda a história em redor da redescoberta de “De Rerum Natura”, criando um livro de não-ficção romanceado, fazendo lembrar muitas vezes Umberto Eco e Dan Brown. O relato teve direito a Pulitzer e National Book Award, ambos na categoria Não-ficção.

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Chris Aldrich

Stephen Greenblatt provides an interesting synthesis of history and philosophy. Greenblatt's love of the humanities certainly shines through. This stands as an almost over-exciting commercial for not only reading Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura," but in motivating the reader to actually go out to learn Latin to appreciate it properly.

I would have loved more direct analysis and evidence of the immediate impact of Lucretius in the 1400's as well as a longer in-depth analysis of the continuing impact through the 1700's. 

The first half of the book is excellent at painting a vivid portrait of the life and times of Poggio Bracciolini which one doesn't commonly encounter. I'm almost reminded of Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life, though Greenblatt has far more historical material with which to paint the picture. I may also be biased that I'm more interested in the mechanics of the scholarship of the resurgence of the classics in the Renaissance than I was of that particular political portion of the first century BCE. Though my background on the history of the time periods involved is reasonably advanced, I fear that Greenblatt may be leaving out a tad too much for the broader reading public who may not be so well versed. The fact that he does bring so many clear specifics to the forefront may more than compensate for this however. 

In some interesting respects, this could be considered the humanities counterpart to the more science-centric story of Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. Though Simon Winchester is still by far my favorite nonfiction writer, Greenblatt does an exceedingly good job of narrating what isn't necessarily a very linear story. 

Greenblatt includes lots of interesting tidbits and some great history. I wish it had continued on longer... I'd love to have the spare time to lose myself in the extensive bibliography. Though the footnotes, bibliography, and index account for about 40% of the book, the average reader should take a reasonable look at the quarter or so of the footnotes which add some interesting additional background an subtleties to the text as well as to some of the translations that are discussed therein.

I am definitely very interested in the science behind textual preservation which is presented as the underlying motivation for the action in this book. I wish that Greenblatt had covered some of these aspects in the same vivid detail he exhibited for other portions of the story. Perhaps summarizing some more of the relevant scholarship involved in transmitting and restoring old texts as presented in Bart Ehrman and Bruce Metzter's The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption & Restoration would have been a welcome addition given the audience of the book. It might also have presented a more nuanced picture of the character of the Church and their predicament presented in the text as well.

Though I only caught one small reference to modern day politics (a prison statistic for America which was obscured in a footnote), I find myself wishing that Greenblatt had spent at least a few paragraphs or even a short chapter drawing direct parallels to our present-day political landscape. I understand why he didn't broach the subject as it would tend to date an otherwise timeless feeling text and generally serve to dissuade a portion of his readership and in particular, the portion which most needs to read such a book. I can certainly see a strong need for having another short burst of popularity for "On the Nature of Things" to assist with the anti-science and overly pro-religion climate we're facing in American politics. 

For those interested in the topic, I might suggest that this text has some flavor of Big History in its DNA. It covers not only a fairly significant chunk of recorded human history, but has some broader influential philosophical themes that underlie a potential change in the direction of history which we've been living for the past 300 years. There's also an intriguing overlap of multidisciplinary studies going on in terms of the history, science, philosophy, and technology involved in the multiple time periods discussed.

Jeni Enjaian

This was a pretty lousy book. I actually first started reading it as an audiobook but couldn't get past the first couple minutes. (This was mainly due to a horrible narrator. However, I could tell that this book would be pretentious nonsense from just those few paragraphs.)
The narrative has no structured flow. It's almost as if the author started musing about his thoughts on an ancient poem and decided they were good enough for a book as is. His prose is fairly elegant but pointless aka he talks a big game but can't live up to it. He also bases the book on a whole lot of conjectures. That's extremely shaky ground for any kind of "historian."
I do not recommend this book at all.

Daryl Houston

I really enjoyed parts of the book, though I felt at times as if Greenblatt focused more on Poggio's story than on Lucretius's and on how the notion of the swerve influenced the modern world. Maybe there just weren't that many dots to connect. If nothing else, it made me want to go back and reread some old things and see if I could solider my way through De Rerum Natura. I liked it -- just found it to be more meandering than I had expected.

This is the kind of book that you never want to end. I wish it were 1,000 pages long. I want more.

The basic idea here is that a 15th century papal bureaucrat and bibliophile discovered a long-lost work by Lucretius, and that discovery—thanks to its lucid description of Epicureanism and the sheer beauty of the poem that drove that message through the heart and into the soul of its readers—led directly to the questioning of dogma and the rise of materialistic/scientific thinking. 

That's how we got the modern world. 

Greenblatt is a gifted storyteller. The premise is fascinating, but it could easily make for dry material. Greenblatt breathes live into it. There's not a dull moment in the book. 

Read this.

The Swerve How the World Became Modern

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