Book description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old
manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had
discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously
surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the
Nature of Things by Lucretius and it changed the course of
history.
He found 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. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance,
inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thoughts of Montaigne, Darwin and Einstein.
An innovative work of history by one of the world's most celebrated
scholars and a thrilling story of discovery, The Swerve details
how one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, made
possible the world as we know it.
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction
Stephen Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar. He has
written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new
historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare
studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. His most
popular work is
Will in the World
, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the
New York Times
bestseller list for nine weeks. He is also co-founder of the
literary-cultural journal
Representations
.
