Point Books To The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Original Title:	The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
ISBN:	0393343405 (ISBN13: 9780393343403)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Ovid (Roman), Poggio Bracciolini, Lucretius
Literary Awards:	Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (2012), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Nonfiction (2012), National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction (2011), James Russell Lowell Prize (2011), Cundill History Prize Nominee (2012)

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Paperback | Pages: 356 pages

Be Specific About Based On Books The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Title	:	The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Author	:	Stephen Greenblatt
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 356 pages
Published	:	September 4th 2012 by W. W. Norton Company (first published September 26th 2011)
Categories	:	History. Nonfiction. Philosophy. Science. Religion

Representaion During Books The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

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.

Rating Based On Books The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Ratings: 3.85 From 26016 Users | 2677 Reviews

Write-Up Based On Books The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

This review has been revised and can now be seen at Shelf Inflicted (a Group Blog).Changed my life forever, did this book.Reposting the body of the review.***De rerum natura was a long narrative poem expounding Epicurean philosophy that was written in the first century before the common era. I am told by those possessed of sufficient Latin fluency to appreciate it that it is beautiful. I am not possessed of that level of fluency, and to me it seemed agonizingly impenetrable and obscurantist.But

That this mediocre book won a Pulitzer Prize substantially diminishes for me the significance of Pulitzer Prizes. There are two tangentially connected stories here, which Greenblatt tries to weave together. One is a popular, personalized history of the medieval Florentine humanist and bookhunter, Poggio Bracciolini, who is Greenblatt's subject by virtue of being the person rediscovered the book De rerum natura, known in English as On the Nature of Things, by the Epicurean Roman philosopher-poet

However beautifully told--and it is--I think the main thrust of Greenblatt's history, that the discovery in 1417 of Lucretius's long lost poem On the Nature of Things changed the course of history might be a little overstated. We were going to arrive at who we are without Lucretius and I have reservations about saying the rediscovery of him and his philosophically enlightened poem by Bracciolini on the cusp of the Renaissance speeded up the acquiring of knowledge or helped beat back the tides of

"When we say...that pleasure is the end and aim of life, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life;

Usually five stars is my rating for a classic I read that was everything I hoped it would be. Nonfiction only gets five stars if it's very special. Once or twice a year. This book is great.It's a microhistory; that's a book that takes a little niche in history, and generally uses that niche to jump around and explore a bunch of different eras through a specific lens. Salt is a great example, although not a great book. This book uses Lucretius' 50 BCE The Nature of Things as its lens, and it

I came to this work, caution my armor, having heard that it was a bit speculative. I just finished reading Lucretius, and having seen that this book has been widely read, I decided it would be fun to read a modern perspective on the poet. But some speculative proposals were not the only problems with this book.First, the title is completely misleading. "The Swerve" is a direct reference to the action Lucretius's ancient atoms commit in order to produce the physical world we see. Greenblatt

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius was one of my favorite books I read when I was an undergraduate philosophy student. Perhaps it helped that my professor was a thin man, with a sprawling beard, and intense green eyes, who would shriek the lines of the poem like a Puritan preacher. Fortunately, Stephen Greenblatt cannot take away my experience of reading Lucretius. Much of his book is speculative (if he was here then he probably would have gone to this monastery, and while there, he probably