Usually five stars is my rating for a classic I read that was everything I hoped it would be. Nonfiction only gets five stars if it's very special. Once or twice a year. This book is great.

It's a microhistory; that's a book that takes a little niche in history, and generally uses that niche to jump around and explore a bunch of different eras through a specific lens. Salt is a great example, although not a great book. This book uses Lucretius' 50 BCE The Nature of Things as its lens, and it jumps from Roman times to the Renaissance.

Microhistories can be dangerous; at their worst, they're pointless collections of trivia. But at their best, they tie history together in a nice way. I think they're better if you're got a fair handle on history already, so that the threads these books pick up on are ones you're familiar with. It helps you decide whether you think the author's trying too hard, and it's also just really fun to see the book reference something you already know something about. In Swerve, for example, Greenblatt briefly points out how Giordano Bruno was influenced by Lucretius. I read a book about that dude once, so it's neat to just get the reference, plus I'm confident that the connection is valid. (Both had somehow come to the conclusion that if there's our world, there are probably others, and some of them probably also contain life. Milton figured it out too.)

Greenblatt manages to really bring out the excitement in what's a tremendously important and smart work, but also a difficult one to penetrate. Nature of Things is one of the weirdest epic poems I've ever read. It's a proto-atheist work, so it's important to me, and Greenblatt gave me a way into it; without his context, explanation and enthusiasm, it would have been much harder for me to understand what Lucretius was banging on about.

If one judges a book, particularly a nonfiction one, by the number of marks one's made in it, this is a five-star book. And I do, so it is. Swerve brings what it offers.