Stephen Greenblatt's new non-fiction wonder called, The Swerve, is part adventure tale, part enthralling history of ideas. What a relief, then, it is to be able to escape from this most recent alarmist speculation into (what else?) a book that itself attests to the power of books, or in this case, a single book to change the world. Anticipating 'the death of the book,' IKEA has redesigned the good old BILLY with deeper shelves and glass doors, thus transforming it from a bookcase into a tchotchke cabinet. The latest distress signal being sounded on the chat sites I share with my bookish friends is that IKEA is about to introduce an updated version of its classic BILLY bookcase - some 10 of which totter to overflowing in my own basement. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Publisher.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Swerve Subtitle How the World Became Modern Author Stephen Greenblatt 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. 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.

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.

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.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt