This title is winner of the pulitzer prize for nonfiction. Almost six hundred years ago a short genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement he saw what he had discovered & ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic On the Nature of Things" by Lucretius & it changed the course of history. He found 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 & that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance inspiring Botticelli shaping the thoughts of Montaigne Darwin & Einstein. An innovative work of history by one of the world's most celebrated scholars & a thrilling story of discovery " The Swerve" details how one manuscript plucked from a thousand years of neglect made possible the world as we know it. Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction."