Saturday, July 5, 2014

Greenblatt, 2011, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Intellectual history)



Recommended by a family friend on a visit to Long Island in February, the book focuses on Poggio, a renaissance Italian book hunter, to whom Greenblatt ascribes the preservation and publication of Lucretius’ epicurean ideas from which emerged a modern world view, wherein the senses are the primary source of evidence about how the world works, and a disinterested deity permits the interaction of natural forces in a world made up of tiny particles - atoms.  It is both narrower in focus and more readable than the lengthier book by Ball, 2012, Curiosity. 
David Last, 17 April 2013

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