Swerve (Greenblatt) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A warm, intimate…volume of apple-cheeked popular intellectual history. Mr. Greenblatt…is a very serious and often thorny scholar…. But he also writes crowd pleasers…. The Swerve…brings us Mr. Greenblatt in his more cordial mode. He wears his enormous erudition lightly…. There is abundant evidence here of what is Mr. Greenblatt's great and rare gift as a writer: an ability, to borrow a phrase from The Swerve, to feel fully "the concentrated force of the buried past."
Dwight Garner - New York Times


In The Swerve, the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt investigates why [Lucretius's] book nearly died, how it was saved and what its rescue means to us. [Greenblatt]...was amazed by how personally it spoke to him. Such encounters have become central to the philosophy Greenblatt has elaborated in several decades of work as a literary historian and theorist of the “new historicism” in literary studies. It combines hardheaded investigations of historical context with a profound feeling for the way writers somehow pull free from time, to enter the minds of readers.
Sarah Bakewell - New York Times Book Review


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.
Long Island Newsday


[The Swerve] is thrilling, suspenseful tale that left this reader inspired and full of questions about the ongoing project known as human civilization.
Boston Globe


But Swerve is an intense, emotional telling of a true story, one with much at stake for all of us. And the further you read, the more astonishing it becomes. It's a chapter in how we became what we are, how we arrived at the worldview of the present. No one can tell the whole story, but Greenblatt seizes on a crucial pivot, a moment of recovery, of transmission, as amazing as anything in fiction.
Philadelphia Inquirer


The Swerve is one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that's so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR


Can a poem change the world? Harvard professor and bestselling Shakespeare biographer Greenblatt ably shows in this mesmerizing intellectual history that it can. A richly entertaining read about a radical ancient Roman text that shook Renaissance Europe and inspired shockingly modern ideas (like the atom) that still reverberate today.
Newsweek


It's fascinating to watch Greenblatt trace the dissemination of these ideas through 15th-century Europe and beyond, thanks in good part to Bracciolini's recovery of Lucretius' poem.
Salon.com


(Starred review.) In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt (Will in the World) turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth.... In an obscure monastery in southern Germany lay the recovery of a philosophy free of superstition and dogma. Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things." ... [The] finding lay what Greenblatt...terms a historic swerve of massive proportions, propagated by such seminal and often heretical truth tellers as Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Montaigne. We even learn the history of the bookworm.... Nearly 70 pages of notes and bibliography do nothing to spoil the fun of Greenblatt's marvelous tale. 16 pages of color illus.
Publishers Weekly


Whether one poem ["The Nature of Things" by Lucretius] could be so influential is questionable. In addition to this overzealous history, book lovers are rewarded with brilliant descriptions of the history of books, libraries, and fascinating detail about manuscript production.... "Greenblatt's masterful account transcends [Bracciolini's] significant discovery," read the review of the National Book Award-winning Norton hardcover. —Susan Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., Chicago
Library Journal


Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard Univ.; Shakespeare's Freedom, 2010, etc.) makes another intellectually fetching foray into the Renaissance—with digressions into antiquity and the recent past—in search of a root of modernity. More than 2,000 years ago, Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things, which spoke of such things as the atomic structure of all that exists, of natural selection, the denial of an afterlife, the inherent sexuality of the universe, the cruelty of religion and the highest goal of human life being the enhancement of pleasure. It was a dangerous book and wildly at odds with the powers that be.... Greenblatt brilliantly ushers readers into this world.... More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian.
Kirkus Reviews