The Swerve PDF Free Download

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Audible – Unabridged ridged
Author: Stephen Greenblatt ID: B005QPONF2

Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, 2012National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2012Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt’s works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s 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 by Lucretius-a beautiful poem containing 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.
Done.
Audible Audio EditionListening Length: 9 hours and 44 minutesProgram Type: AudiobookVersion: UnabridgedPublisher: Recorded BooksAudible.com Release Date: September 29, 2011Whispersync for Voice: ReadyLanguage: EnglishID: B005QPONF2 Best Sellers Rank: #304 in Books > Audible Audiobooks > History #2657 in Books > History
In the early 15th century Western Europe was just emerging from a couple of centuries of plague, famine, and conflict. Led by the city states of northern Italy, the Europeans were attempting to find their footing, and to do so they looked back 1500 years or more to the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Scholarly humanists began to search out and restudy old scrolls and ancient manuscripts in order to relearn much of what had been lost during the Dark Ages. Of these none was more important than Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary whose Pope had been overthrown and replaced, and who dealt with his loss of power and income by searching monasteries in Germany and Switzerland for forgotten scripts. His greatest discovery was Lucretius’ long poem On The Nature Of Things, which he copied and had distributed, ensuring that it became a seminal document of the emerging Renaissance.

Lucretius had been a Epicurean philosopher during the Roman Empire, who taught that the soul did not survive death and that all living things were made up tiny particles or atomi. Epicureans called on people to enjoy a good life (not a hedonistic one as is often supposed) without worrying about the wrath of God or the gods, who did not concern themselves with anything so insignificant as human affairs. This has a modern ring to us, as it should since Lucretius’ writings, as Stephen Greenblatt so ably shows, helped to shape the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Lucretius’ ideas were unwelcome to many in the Church hierarchy, and those who followed his ideas were often in danger of perseuction or even execution.

Stephen Greenblatt has produced a fascinating chronicle of Lucretius, Poggio, and the worlds they inhabited.
The thesis and tone of The Swerve echo Jacob Burckhardt’s now somewhat discredited 19th century characterization of the Italian Renaissance with its celebrations of life and beauty as a "return to paganism" (as though the Middle Ages didn’t have its festivals and gai savoir). Burckhardt’s book may be outdated as history but is nevertheless a masterpiece of Romantic historiography that repays rereading. Greenblatt is no Burckhardt, but it sounds like his book will also be valuable – even only insofar as it is successful in familiarizing contemporary readers with the role of characters like the colorful Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla and their manuscript-hunting Humanist confreres, many of whom were employees, like Poggio himself, of the Papal court.

Greenblatt seriously overstates the role of Lucretius, whose influence, until the mid to late 18th century was arguably quite marginal. Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, unfortunately not mentioned by Greenblatt, deals at length with the influence of Lucretius on French Enlightenment thinkers, many of whom really were "pagans", i.e., materialists and epicureans. The standard view, of course, is that a revival of Platonic idealism, not of "pagan" materialism, was responsible for the Renaissance preoccupation with beauty and harmony.

Poggio’s fifteenth century discovery of the manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura was not commented on much by Renaissance humanists, who confined themselves to remarks about Lucretius’s grammar and syntax. It was printed in 1511 with a commentary by Denys Lambin, who termed Lucretius’s Epicurean ideas "fanciful, absurd, and opposed to Christianity" — and Lambin’s preface remained standard until the nineteenth century.
I consider myself to be a person in the modern camp. I am non-religious, scientifically minded and a humanist and when I heard about "Swerve", I had to read it. It seemed like red meat for me. Actually it was way too much red meat.
By the time I reached half way through the book, I was feeling such rage against the Roman Catholic Church that my heart was pounding. An institution raging in obscuritanism, mass delusion,murder and suppression of the mind had blotted out the advance of Western Civilization, until a scribe found an ancient poem. I put the book down and calmed down myself. Later on, I skimmed the last half of the book.
The problem with "Swerve" is that it is a polemic and it is trying to be something else. If you want a polemic against christianity and how it has ruined Western Civilization, I recommend Friedrich Nietzsche’s "The Anti-Christ". Nietzsche admitted he was writing a polemic and he was one of best polemic writers of all time. The polemical nature of this book weakens it, since it seems that the fires have to be relit constantly and you get the impression that a lot of information is being left out that does not feed the fire.
Another problem with "Swerve", is the way Lucretius is handled. His poem is treated as the only spark that ignited generations of scientific minds in Western Civilization. It is utterly too simplistic. Indeed the Catholic Church itself harbored humanists and scientific thinkers before the Reformation caused them to shamefully over react later on. The dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica was not built by other worldly delusional thinkers. Did the architects of St Peter’s have a copy of Lucretius with them?
Download Audiobooks with Audible com available at the web address www audible com access The Swerve How the World Became Modern UNABRIDGED How the World Became Modern UNABRIDGED The Swerve How the World Became Modern by Home Catalog History European History The Swerve How the World Became Modern Buy from a third party Audio Download Audible com Unabridged

Download The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Audible – Unabridged ridged PDF Free Download

MahajanaGagah840

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: