Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
(...)I was one whose reaction to Swerve was that Greenblatt was entirely too familiar with the workings of Poggio’s mind. Greenblatt clearly knows his stuff and I was entertained by his lively intelligence and broad range, which made for an entertaining read, but ultimately in such a short book, at a scanty 200 pages of text, the proportion of speculation to hard fact did a disservice to the treatment of the discovery and dissemination of a seminal text, which after all was the theme of the book.
Compounding this, Greenblatt tried to have it both ways. I agree that he didn’t specifically claim that Lucretius was single-handedly responsible for the Renaissance. But the title, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, explicitly does make that claim. Ah, marketing! A book the general public could read and feel as if we’re smarter than we really are! And pat ourselves on the back for our taste and acumen. Then of course the Pulitzer and the NBA served to heighten that impression.
Part of this is the issue of the popular historian v. the academic historian. There’s nothing wrong with popular history (David McCullough, for example, some of whose books are better than others, although I’d never read another word from that plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin no matter how well regarded), but I tend to expect more from an academic historian whose credentials are front and center. I think the hybrid, academic historian writing popular history is dangerous, setting up impossible expectations and tending to discourage critical evaluation at least by the reading public and the popular press.
Obviously there’s a continuum regarding just how much narrative is appropriate to a particular nonfiction work and I’d argue that subject matter plays a role. I already plan to revisit these issues with Fanny and Stella, lol. But I’m concurrently reading an also-ran from this month, The Sleepwalkers, and it’s something of a relief to be reading a highly researched and detailed work where inference is based on the facts as presented in the text and clearly labeled as such.
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Yes, Issybird, I couldn't agree more with you here. It seems these days that all history has to be popularized.
The novelist who writes a novel, lightly based on historical facts, seems to me to be more honest in his writing than an academic, trying to reach the public by whatever means he thinks fit.
The latter tends to give me somewhat of an aftertaste and that is what I get when reading The Swerve, however well it is researched.
I am also reading the Sleepwalkers and am gratified at the attention to historical research and report, especially when reading about Serbia. My impression
Spoiler:
This is (perhaps) another view on the First World War, in which my country was neutral. But in that war, there was a crisis, unrest, as there were trade barriers and food shortage because of that war. Also the Spanish flu, a world epidemic, took many lives. Revolution in Russia, attempts in Germany and even in the Netherlands (Troelstra).
As the writer states: there's been a lot of analysis, documentation about the prelude of this war from the different countries involved. All with their own story.
I know in England many sons of the aristocrats went to war and almost a whole generation of young men was wiped out, or returned shell-shocked and mentally crippled for life.
I am interested in the role of Serbia; the gap between its unrealistic nationalism and the reality of those days. Also the role of the French, who loaned money to that penniless, highly explosive, state. All of what is written about that period of the Serbian history should be taken in account when thinking, discussing the massacre of Srebenica in 1995 during the Bosnian war. That still is a trauma in our country, because of the role of the Dutchbat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebreni...