Ben Waber reviewed The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
An Extremely Well-Written but Not Exactly Rigorous History
3 stars
Greenblatt traces the journey of various great works of Greek and Roman literature and philosophy through the centuries, examining their geographic flow, challenges in preservation, and hypothesizing about the effects of their reemergence in Europe as a precondition to the Renaissance. The writing here is excellent, but the historical analysis is shakier, with many leaps in reasoning made with no supporting evidence, although the arc of the literary industry through the centuries is well documented and fascinating. Overall, this is an interesting and useful book on a fairly understudied era of Western history.