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swerve: how the world became modern

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Target Audience : Adult . Overview : 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.rnNearly 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. Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction ; Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Stephen Greenblatt.

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Availability

Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

940.21 GRE s

Publisher

Los Angeles : W.W. Norton., 2011

Collation

356 p., [8] p. of plates : col. ill. ; 25 cm.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780393064476

Classification

940.21 GRE s

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

1st ed.

Subject(s)

Lucretius Carus, Titus - Influence
Lucretius Carus, Titus. De rerum natura
Renaissance
Philosophy, Renaissance
Science, Renaissance
Civilization, Modern

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

by Stephen Greenblatt

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