Lexi

Powerful, extraordinary, deeply insightful

Revisado: 08-18-15

The Swerve, How the World Became Modern
The book is about a former secretary to several popes who becomes the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His greatest find in a remote German monastery is a copy of Lucretius’ poem “On the Nature of Things,” which had been lost to history for well more than a thousand years. Along the way of this search there is fascinating exploration of the history of book collecting (especially the classics), paper making over the centuries, the formation of libraries, and how books survived from ancient Rome and Greece due to being copied for generations by monks. But the true power of the book is that Lucretius recognized that all matter is composed of atoms swerving in new directions and thus subject to the forces of evolution. This provides the basis for humanism which recognizes that virtue is achieved through pleasure (friends, literature, art) and not through self-denial (the religious fear underlying subjecting oneself to the orthodoxy of the church to please God). The subversive poem, written before the time of Christ, inspired the thinking and discoveries of Galileo, Freud, Darwin, and Einstein as well as Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson.

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