The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt ($18.95, paperback), available to order online here or call the store, 505-988-4226)

Review by New York Times bestselling author, Dan Flores. Dan's book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Prize, will appear in a new, expanded edition in January of 2026. His book, American Serengeti, was the winner of the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize in 2017. His most recent work,Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America (NY: W. W. Norton, 2022 cloth, 2023 paper) won the prestigious Rachel Carson Environmental Book Prize in 2023 and was a Finalist for the Ralph Waldo Emerson book prize that year.

The Swerve: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction (2012) • Winner of the National Book Award (2011) • New York Times Bestseller

Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern was my out-of-the-gate escape from working on an ambitious book that had been my personal Pandemic Project. I knew The Swerve had won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize back in 2012. I just hadn’t been able to get at it.

Greenblatt’s story is a marvel. It tracks the 1417 discovery of a long-lost, brilliant work of poetry, On the Nature of Things, from the ancient world. Written by a Roman pagan named Lucretius 2,100 years before our time in the 1400s, it had lain unknown for fifteen centuries. Liberated from antiquity and circulated during the Renaissance, this pagan’s ideas “swerved” western thought from its suffocating religious straitjacket towards a post-Darwin, even contemporary, worldview. To tell its story, The Swerve exquisitely recreates two worlds: a European Renaissance held captive by religion but fascinated with the lost knowledge of a Greco/Roman Golden Age, and a pre-Christian past of intellectual inquiry fully capable of producing On the Nature of Things.

The author devotes much space to the Florence antiquities hunter, Poggio Bracciolini, who excavated Lucretius’s long-forgotten work from a crumbling monastery. But the shining, unforgettable character here is the mind that spun On the Nature of Things. We actually know little about Lucretius except that he was a disciple of the earlier Greek philosopher, Epicurus. But his mind lives on, and it tells us that everything in the universe, including us, is merely an assemblage of atoms. There are no spirits, no devils, no angels. There might be gods, but they neither resemble us nor take any interest in us, as we are no different from all other forms of life. “Souls,” perhaps, exist but are mortal like the rest of our bodies. So no one should be deluded into hoping for an afterlife, a “better place.” Which means (here is the debt to Epicurus) that the point of life is to avoid pain and consciously indulge the garden of earthly delights, the pleasures of being alive. To ensure you understand how these ideas infiltrated the world, Greenblatt ends by noting that Thomas Jefferson, a self-professed Epicurean, owned copies of On the Nature of Things in three languages, which is why our Declaration of Independence includes an inalienable right not just to life and liberty but to “the pursuit of Happiness.”

Greenblatt is primarily a Harvard scholar of Shakespeare, but his op-ed, “We Are

Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself” was published in the New York Times on September 8th.