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The Swerve
- How the World Became Modern
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
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The Swerve
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Publisher's Summary
Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, 2012
National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2012
Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt’s works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion.
Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s 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 by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing 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.
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 2019-04-02
It shows how ideas produce progress
Very interesting and well presented perspective of how ideas at their conservation can lead to modernity and progress, the original ideas oh Lucretius of how the world works we’re preserved, interpreted and enhanced and despite of different attempts to vanished them flourished because they were true and powerful and finally it is these ideas that shows how the world became modern. Highly recommended, the narration was also very good in conveying the ideas.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Ostap
- 2023-05-04
Awesome
A powerful story that shows that many of modern ideas where already present in some brilliant minds of the distant past.
A fascinating book!
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Austin Fusilier
- 2019-06-28
Poor argument and historical inaccuracy...
Well written enough to garner three stars, but deductions for poor argument and historical inaccuracy.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, but notably, not the Pulitzer for History. In a perhaps-related item: Greenblatt has been roundly criticized by historians for his depiction of the Middle Ages -- to put it lightly, he's exceedingly incorrect, in a way that undermines his book's central point. He posits that the rise of Christianity as state religion drove people to condemn (and therefore cease) study of "pagan" and secular ideas, driving the thought of Lucretius (and Epicurius before him) into disrepute. But when our intrepid "humanist" investigators (themselves Christians, a fact inconvenient to the book's thesis, and therefore de-emphasized) find Lucretius's work again (preserved, as it was, in Christian monasteries), they saved "modern" thought and created the modern world.
This is all problematic, of course, given that the "Dark Ages" Greenblatt obliquely invokes didn't actually happen. The book reads more like an attempt to justify Greenblatt's bleed-through-the-text disdain for Christianity (which, as a governing state ideology, certainly has a less-than-stellar track record) by substituting a non-deist moral structure for the world. He's excited about the idea that a non-Christian, non-Judeo, non-religious governing principle can exist, and overextends himself to the point of factual distortion.
Greenblatt, in his attempt to evade religious stricture, has had a "Come to Epicurius" moment. "This confirms my priors! Salvation at last!"
Lucretius's work is fascinating (though, contra the author, not ignored), and the modern mis-apprehension of Epicurian thought is lamentable; but this is not the book to correct those errors.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Trent DeJong
- 2018-05-29
Good storytelling, naive and ignorant commentary
Obviously Greenblatt never read (or understood) Nietzsche, who would condemn this ideslistic apologetic to Modernism. Anyone who reads a little history knows this view of the Middle Ages is outdated. Good storytelling about the discovery of manuscript.
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