[Hac-announce] Book Discussion: The Swerve

[Dan Blinn]

The Book Group will meet at USNH on Saturday, December 14 at 2:00 pm to
discuss The Swerve: How the World Became
Modern<http://www.amazon.com/The-Swerve-World-Became-Modern/dp/0393343405>by
Stephen Greenblatt.

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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura>*, 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.

The book is widely available at public libraries and at on-line and retail
bookstores.  Refreshments will be served.
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