The Swerve

How the World Became Modern

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins

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.

©2011 Stephen Greenblatt (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian." ( Kirkus Reviews)

"In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth." ( Publishers Weekly)

“Pleasure may or may not be the true end of life, but for book lovers, few experiences can match the intellectual-aesthetic enjoyment delivered by a well-wrought book. In the world of serious nonfiction, Stephen Greenblatt is a pleasure maker without peer.” ( Newsday)

Note to self: Read more Greenblatt

Ah, Stephen Greenblatt. How much I prefer you to Harold Bloom. You prove things, not just assert them. You have a clear narrative, though not lacking in complexity. I really have to read more Greenblatt.

The title is a bit misleading. How the world became modern? In what way? The narrative of this history revolves around the book On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. It is a beautifully written Latin poem that describes a world view familiar to modern-day atheists, philosophical Buddhists, and physics lovers. All the universe made up of moving atoms that form and fall apart and form other things. That being true, there are no gods, so enjoy the life you have before it is over forever. Don't mistake this for the reputation of Epicureanism of mindless pleasure. Real Epicureanism is more Buddhist, attempting to take pleasure in the now without excess, mindful that life has disappointments.

This text nearly disappeared during the Medieval period until a Renaissance book lover found it and saved it from obscurity and destruction.

The narrative first follows the philosophy in the ancient world, its restoration by the Italian book collector, then its spread in intellectual life throughout the centuries, influencing many writers and thinkers, including the American Founding Fathers.

This is a compelling read. Though 400+ pages, you don't feel them. It moves quickly, with stories, anecdotes, analysis, and appreciation of the fortunes of history and the beauty of an old poem.

Exciting, I couldn't wait for the next page

Books like this ruin it for me since they are so much better written (and read) than the average. Each page is exciting and I couldn't wait for the next. How an author can do that about an era which I've avoided because of its dryness is a compliment to the author. What I like best about the book is now I feel like I'm a scholar of the Italian Renaissance and the Epicurean movement! I never knew that something about book binding, Epicurean philosophy, script development and a poem could keep me on the edge of my seat and eagerly awaiting for the next paragraph.

You don't have to have the faintest interest in the Italian Renaissance or Latin Poetry to appreciate this book. The author is that good of a writer, and he will make you anxiously await the next page.

History can be Fun

The basic premise of this book -- that one poem modernized the world-- is a little unrealistic. However, the history is both fascinating and delightfully narrated. I don't even like history but this book is brilliant. It is witty and fun and was a pleasure to listen to.
I knew nothing about Lucretius, and now I know a great deal. I have never stopped to wonder how old books have been passed down through the ages. Well, now I know.
I highly recommend this great listen!

SWERVE

“The Swerve” won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction. This is high praise for Stephen Greenblatt which one may guardedly agree with; i.e. the guardedness is in the suggestion that the story reveals “…How the World Became Modern”.

“The Swerve” is a book about books and the prescient insight of ancient philosophers that believed something to be true before science could prove it. Greenblatt’s thesis is that Poggio Bracciolini’s discovery of an ancient text changed the direction of human thought. Like suggesting that Lucretius’ insight forged modernity, Greenblatt overstates Poggio’s discovery as the re-direction of human thought.

“The Swerve” is an interesting book that suggests humanism pre-dates 19th century humanist philosophy by 2000 years. Considering Lucretius’ beliefs in man’s relationship to all things, the absence of a Prime Mover, a prescient belief in evolutionary selection, and particles that make the universe. Lucretius seems to pre-date Darwin, 16th century atheism, 18th century philosophy, 19th century science, and 20th century physics. “The Swerve” is quite an amazing story. Hopefully, there are many more swerves in humankind’s’ evolutionary journey.

You Can't be Serious

Would you try another book from Stephen Greenblatt and/or Edoardo Ballerini?

At first I didn't like the narrator but his elegant sounding Italian won me over somewhat.

Would you be willing to try another book from Stephen Greenblatt? Why or why not?

I don't know. Maybe.

Did The Swerve inspire you to do anything?

I was inspired to look up some names. Those people were real...I could find them in Wikipedia.

Any additional comments?

The humanist poet, Lucretious
Penned some verses the Church thought were specious
When Poggia found 'em
He spread 'em around 'n
Pretended to think them facetious.

A smart, vivid account of a poem's survival.

Would you listen to The Swerve again? Why?

I have read this twice. Wanted to make sure I didn't misunderstand any part of it. It was also a great pleasure to read the words and have them provide lush details of the past.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Swerve?

Greenblatt is able to offer several memorable moments that I could identify with as a human, a son and a father. The description of how the first Pope John XXIII was erased from history.

Which character – as performed by Edoardo Ballerini – was your favorite?

Ballerini's rich encapsulation of this book truly brought emotion, gravitas and levity at the right time. His portrayal of Poggio is my standout favorite.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

This book was a pleasure to listen to. Looked forward to any break in my day to open this and reconnect with the freeing nature of the subject matter.

Any additional comments?

I spent most of my life listening for the words that could explain my beliefs. What I felt deep inside but did not have the confidence to describe in my own words. This book has given me tools by which I can forge a working description of my belief system.

A Generally Fun, Near-Fantasy of a Poem's Power

Stephen Greenblatt was one of the heroes of my graduate school era. He was perhaps the foremost of the Shakespearian New Historicists who provided a counterpoint to the deconstructionism that had overwhelmed the field several years before I arrived. Where the deconstructionists – calling themselves post-structuralists – were fundamentally concerned with structure (or its aftermath), the New Historicists insisted that texts took their meaning from context.

Greenblatt developed a method where we could show that texts didn’t simply rest on top of history (which is a shorthand for describing the “old historicism”) but that they shaped the history of which they were a part. Shakespeare didn’t simply observe Elizabethan politics; in perhaps the most famous example, Robert Devereux commissioned a performance of Richard II (a play about an uprising against a sitting English monarch) the night before he began his own failed uprising. That is, New Historicists see texts as shaping the way people see their age and, as a consequence, how they see new possibilities for themselves and their culture. And, incidentally, they showed a way beyond the nihilism of deconstruction – or at least what I came to see as its frequent nihilistic applications.

So, I’m all in on Greenblatt. People doing similar things in American literarature – like Sacvan Bercovitch and Anne Douglas – became the thinkers who guided my own eventual work, but he was the first to make clear what was possible.

That said, this a very interesting set of observations, but I’m not sure it’s an entirely coherent book. In some ways, it’s doing three different things – things that are largely incompatible as a straightforward story – and pretending they line up more neatly than they do.

One part of this is an explanation for the power of philosophy out of the epicurean school. It’s very interesting work, and I absolutely enjoy what Greenblatt has to say about the early thinkers in the field. Naively, I’d bought the case against those early thinkers. Epicurus, was not – as I’d heard – a supporter of gluttony, but rather someone who believed that, with the heavens disinterested in our human condition, we ought to achieve the highest happiness possible in our own lives.

Another, final part, is Greenblatt’s claim that Lucretius, the Latin poet whose De Rerum Natura turned that philosophy into poetry, was a central influence on the Modern world. I confess to some skepticism in all that, but Greenblatt does an impressive job of showing that the first wave of early modern philosophers – like Thomas More, Erasmus – and then later thinkers like Montaigne, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and many others, were inspired directly by Lucretius (and therefore by Epicurus) as they created the modern world.

But the main part of this is the connecting story between those two points, the story of how an Italian humanist scholar, Poggio Bracciolini, found what might have been the only extant copy of De Rerum Natura in a monastery, had it copied, and then championed it so that, within a couple decades, it had become a major source of ideas for the early Renaissance world.

I like to think I’ve been in Greenblatt’s position in my own work. There are dozens of great stories to tell about various Jewish gangsters whose careers intersected but rarely ran parallel. The challenge is to find “a hero,” one character who sits at the middle of the story and ties it all together.

That’s who Poggio is in this. Greenblatt writes affectingly – sometimes over-the-top – about the implications of Poggio’s discoveries. (I can’t quote it, but there’s at least one line about how – had he known it – he was taking the future off the shelves and putting it back in the world when he pulled down the manuscript.) Never mind that, in a kind of mumbled voice at the end, Greenblatt confesses that there were at least a couple complete manuscript copies of De Rerum Natura extant in other libraries – manuscripts that survive today even as the one Poggio found has been lost. And never mind that, influential as Lucretius is, he was not the only source for Epicurian thought to survive into the Renaissance and into the Modern world. And never mind that, for all that Democritus and other proto-Epicurians talked about “atoms” that construct all things in the world, there were other significant scientific and philosophical sources for that general way of seeing the world.

So, by forcing what amounts to a wide range of Classical thought through the eye-of-the-needle story of Poggio’s recovery of Lucretius down to the notion that Lucretius is central to most Modern thought, Greenblatt seems to make his case too tightly. Epicurus apparently moved beyond Democritus by insisting that atoms could “swerve,” that there was what we might today recognize as a kind of quantum uncertainty that make free will possible. That’s good stuff, but it seems more parallel to what we understand today rather than – as Greenblatt insists – its origin.

And yet, this is ultimately enormous fun. Just as Greenblatt long ago taught me (and many more talented others) how to understand the ways that text can reshape the culture of which they’re a part, he makes a broader and ultimately fabulous claim. Lucretius may not be as central as he claims, and Poggio – central as he is to the story – isn’t the only reason Lucretius’s work came to be recovered, but it’s a great near-fantasy for the enduring power of philosophy and poetry to remake the world.

The bottom-line test of this for me is a simple one: now that I’m finished with this, I’m itching to read Lucretius.

Poetic journey

Poetic depiction of dark middle ages and journey of old classics work like Lucrectius’s poem On Nature of Things through hands of monks and rediscoveries by Poggio Bracciolini and others book hunters led to our modern view of the world, which was sown thousand of years ago. Search for old books and knowledge is the most poetic treasure hunting I know. Journey of those masterpieces through centuries to our time without digital tools or letterpress are intriguing and shows, that knowledge and thoughts is highly prized for people (at least for some...). This book also reminded me that technology, politics and culture change, but people for now remains the same , for the cultural evolution is quite short in opposite to milions of years in the jungle (so we can adapt over long time, destroy ourselfs, edit ourself, upgrade ourselfs or transform to mechanical form of life, but thats another story...). In our age of internet everyone have the opportunity to voice his/hers thoughts (and we have many young writers and enterpreneurs thanks to that), every little information can be stored for years and found online, yet thanks to it the volume which is too much to comprehend for one man and distincion between the rubish and worthy information is harder and harder making choosing the right volumes for study more difficult. In this light those old masterpieces that make it over centuries offers some guide/proof of quality and are always good choice for study (at least for me). They are echoes of times when writen word was much more precious and people have more calm, time and space for its study (at least those that have a chance to do it) in opposite to our rushing times when we suck information hurriedly and therefore usually reducing our understanding and quality when producing those writings.

This Has It All

This is the story of persistence by strong personalities to recover ancient writings that enabled secular and scientific advancements.

A brilliant investigation of history and philosophy

This is a superb investigation that brings to light a work of literature and philosophy that has somehow been extremely influential and yet is little known to the vast majority of people living today.

While this book is not a pure page turner such as a non-fiction crime novel, there are certainly a number of astonishing twists and turns and quite a few crimes.

The narrator has a nice, even voice that comes across as thoughtful, and he does an able job with the pronunciation of foreign words and Italian names.

If you enjoy history, philosophy, and ideas this book is for you.