The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

This book is not good. It doesn't make an argument about "how the world became modern." It doesn't even demonstrate that there was a "swerve" of any sort that led to modernity. There's really no cogent argument in this book at all. There is, however, plentiful twisting of history used to push the revisionist narrative that, for centuries, people were basically stupid until a band of rebels played Prometheus, enlightening mankind and freeing it from the bondage of that superstitious nonsense called Christianity.

This book is less a history and more an attempt to create a romantic mythology to promote a neo-Epicureanism. Greenblatt even points to his mother to make the case that we'd all be better off if we embraced such ideals, demonstrating that his real message is about today, not the dawn of the Renaissance. The book would have been much better if he hadn't pretended at writing a history befitting a scholar, with the title implying that it would be a grandiose one at that, and had, instead, just openly written an argument for a "New New Atheism" that is more poetic than Dawkins, Harris, et al. I think that was the point... I don't know why he didn't just say it.