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Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
RE: The Swerve
As far as Kirkpatrick vs. Greenblatt goes, Kirkpatrick may have a point. It's impossible to know without reading the book. What is known is high-profile authors are bound to draw critics, and with that book having been awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, there's no way he could escape criticism.
On the other hand, how many Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards has Harold Kirkpatrick won?
These are the biggest of the biggies; the major majors.
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The book could be very well written and very engaging even with a slanted premise, and the judges for the Pulitzer and National Book Award could have been taken in by the premise without realising that it was slanted. If I hadn't read the criticism on it first I may have been too.
It doesn't fit together well - that the book won two such prestigious awards and yet it appears to have a very biased premise. It seems to me that Kirkpatrick and other reviewers do have a point, and one doesn't need to read the book to decide, because the premise is laid straight out in blurbs about the book - that the discovery of a forgotten manuscript by Lucretius basically single-handedly started the Renaissance. Take this blurb about the book for instance:
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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, 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.
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It's a wonderful blurb and had me hooked - until I realised that its assertion may not be true, or at least overstated. If I didn't believe that Greenblatt really believed it then I might even call it possibly disingenuous. The best I can make of it, this seems to be a very intelligent and very good writer who hit upon an interesting but flawed idea and with zeal and fervour decided to write a book about it, and perhaps subconsciously employed a selection bias in choosing what to include in the book to support his premise.
However, you make some great points and regardless I think the discussion thread for the book could be very interesting.