The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
This book has been on my “to read” list for so long that I can’t remember how it was or who recommended it to me. I had some idea that it was like GUNS GERMS AND STEEL or another one of those “history of technology” books. And it is, sort of.
This book basically serves as an homage to one man, Lucretius, who wrote a beautiful poem that outlined Epicurean thought. Greenblatt begins with a book hunter searching monasteries for old Latin and Greek manuscripts, then takes us through a little of the evolution of attitudes towards Greek and Roman thought.
Once you read the breakdown of the ideas that Lucrecius puts forth in his poem (that the gods cannot be appeased, that the pursuit of happiness is important, that matter is made of atoms) most people can recognize at once how important they are to modern ideas.
Greenblatt takes the history of this book from when it’s found and copied by an ex-papal secretary, and then talks about who finds it after that, and what their fates are when they repeat (or don’t repeat) the ideas.
This is a good book for people who like Classical thought, and for people who are interested in the intellectual terrain of Europe in the Renaissance. It has a huge chunk of end-notes in the back, some of which have interesting tidbits in and of themselves.
