| The Swerve: How the World Became Modern |  | Author: Stephen Greenblatt Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Category: Book
List Price: $26.95 Buy New: $16.88 as of 5/23/2012 03:25 CDT details You Save: $10.07 (37%)
New (61) Used (38) Collectible (9) from $13.93
Seller: SuperBookDeals-- Sales Rank: 525
Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language), English (Published) Media: Hardcover Edition: First Edition Pages: 356 Number Of Items: 1 Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5 Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0393064476 EAN: 9780393064476 ASIN: 0393064476
Publication Date: September 26, 2011 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction 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.
Nearly 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. 16 pages full-color illustrations
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