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I'm about halfway through. My initial impression is that there is considerably more speculation than fact, but the story of the hunt for lost books was compelling. The descriptions of Lucretius's poem were amazing and it is indeed wonderful that the work was not lost forever.
I found the descriptions of the Middle Ages superficial and the tangent on self-flagellation was odd. I'm not religious, but I suspect that Greenblatt's take on Christianity would be very off-putting to those who are religious.
I'm interested in how he weaves Of the Nature of Things into the Renaissance. I'm not going to be easily convinced that one poem was "responsible" for modern thought. History doesn't take place in a vacuum, there were a lot of other influences at the time, plus other Greek and Roman philosophers and scholars were read throughout history.
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