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The grandiose subtitle of The Swerve -- "How the World Became Modern" -- is not a real argument Stephen Greenblatt wanted to make in this or any book. Rather, it is the dull edge of his and his publisher's dishonest marketing scheme to make a superficial, sub-scholarly book sound revelatory. Nowhere does Greenblatt actually claim that Epicureanism, Lucretius or the rediscovery of De rerum natura made the world "modern." Greenblatt just feels they must have had *something* significant to do with it. To this vague thesis he adds further confusion by frequently characterizing Christianity as being opposed to Epicureanism and modernity even though every figure he credits as having aided in the spread of Epicureanism was a Christian or some type of theist. Frequently (but most often buried in his endnotes), Greenblatt quietly admits this opposition between Christianity and Epicureanism is historically baseless. He qualifies his tendentious points so much it's clear they are simply the wrong points to try to make. Greenblatt is at his best when he is illuminating history and advancing a very specific argument by telling a thick, highly contextualized story. His notoriously speculative claims are at least plausible, complete, and reasonably specific when they are based on intricate, well-sourced details. Unfortunately, the only parts of The Swerve that meet this standard are the chapters focused on Poggio Bracciolini and his world in Florence or the papal court. The material on the ancient world is much slighter. Much of it is nothing more than facile polemic against the church in its first centuries, which Greenblatt manages to present as a monolithic, oppressive force even when Christians were being fed to lions. Medievalists will not appreciate Greenblatt's treatment of later Christianity either. He reduces nearly a millenia in the Latin west to a portrait of self-flagellating, corrupt, ignorant monks and nuns. Renaissance and Reformation scholars can only be embarrassed by the complete lack of recognition of reform movements before and after the Protestant Reformation began that Greenblatt must concede were far more enlightening and progressive in their impact than Lucretius. Worst of all, there is no depth coverage of the modern era at all in a book that purports to be about exactly that. Nowhere does Greenblatt even attempt to define modernity. Contemporary experts on that subject (e.g., Charles Taylor) are absent from his notes and bibliography. The last chapter rushes through a half dozen major figures and issues from the 16th to the 19th centuries to end with some paragraphs about Thomas Jefferson, apparently Greenblatt's idea of the greatest modern Epicurean. Even if you take The Swerve as being more of a personal case for Epicureanism rather than a historical study of its transmission and influence, Greenblatt hamstrings his efforts by refusing to engage the most substantial challenges to Epicureanism as an ethically and politically viable philosophy. Like Jefferson's fellow slave-owing Roman predecessors, Greenblatt never seriously considers that the idea of organizing society based on individual pleasure-seeking might in practice be no different than unchecked self-interest of any kind. Nothing in Epicureanism specifically rules out the exploitation of carefully maintained servile populations. Machiavelli's view of religion as useful in maintaining a servile public is briefly mentioned, but Greenblatt characterizes Machiavelli as a skeptical fellow traveller. Thomas More's portrayal of the same idea in Utopia, however, is attacked as reaction against Epicureanism because More seems to indicate (like Plato) that fear of death and divine judgment are needed to keep most people from behaving destructively. Examples abound of Greenblatt prejudicially playing favorites like this, which may just speak to his deeply conflicted feelings about religion. Much like his telling of Poggio's life, Greenblatt may be reluctant to accept that truth does not necessarily support social order, and social order is not the same as justice, but you can't have justice without order. Curiously, whereas Hamlet in Purgatory started with an anecdote about Greenblatt following his father's wishes to be remembered in traditional Jewish prayers for the dead, The Swerve begins with an anecdote about Greenblatt's mother suffering from and inflicting upon her son considerable anxiety about death. From this story Greenblatt embarks on his real argument, which is not that the modern world is Epicurean but that it isn't Epicurean nearly enough, thanks to the continued prevalence of religious ideas that keep people afraid of death and dying. Whereas the earlier book took seriously the idea that religious beliefs and superstition can provide real personal and societal benefits regardless of their truth or falsity, The Swerve swerves in the opposite direction, portraying religion as a wholly negative force. Whatever the cause, this makes for a shallow and immature book that really ought to be about the ways that ancient, medieval and early modern European elites (Christians all) entertained and preserved (rather than obstructed) a tradition of radical skepticism up until tolerance for it was broken and elites were driven by the ideological polarization and social upheaval of the 16th century into either dogmatic camps or a slowly opening secular space defined by scientific rationalism and increasingly indifference if not hostility to religion.