The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
On the surface, it is the story of Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th century Italian scholar who uncovers one of the last remaining manuscripts of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. The meta-story is really about the power of ideas to survive the fall of empire, the dark ages that come after, and re-emerge as the seeds of enlightenment. The narrative is engaging and coherent, and I left both inspired by humanism but also regretting how much knowledge must have been destroyed over the centuries by the forces of superstition and dogma.
