![]() Greenblatt starts with the story of Poggio Bracciolini, the book hunter who rediscovered the Lucretius manuscript in 1417 in a nearly forgotten German monastery, some 1000 years after it had been thought lost. as the foremost expression of Epicurean philosophy.Äepending on how you count, this fairly short book (263 pages) tells four to six different stories, although all are related. Awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, Stephen Greenblatt’s new book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern gives us a fascinating, if somewhat disjointed, history of the suppression, unlikely survival, and subsequent effect on the Enlightenment of what may be the primary humanist document from ancient Greece: On The Nature Of Things by Lucretius, an extended work of poetry recognized at the time of its writing around 60 B.C.E. ![]()
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