Download How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem, by Rod Dreher
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How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem, by Rod Dreher
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Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times bestselling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher spiraled into depression and a stress-related autoimmune disease. Doctors told Dreher that if he didn't find inner peace, he would destroy his health. Soon after, he came across The Divine Comedy in a bookstore and was enchanted by its first lines, which seemed to describe his own condition. In the months that followed Dante helped Dreher understand the mistakes and mistaken beliefs that had torn him down and showed him that he had the power to change his life. Dreher knows firsthand the solace and strength that can be found in Dante's great work, and distills its wisdom for those who are lost in the dark wood of depression, struggling with failure (or success), wrestling with a crisis of faith, alienated from their families or communities, or otherwise enduring the sense of exile that is the human condition. Inspiring, revelatory, and packed with penetrating spiritual, moral, and psychological insights How Dante Can Save Your Life is a book for people, both religious and secular, who find themselves searching for meaning and healing. Dante told his patron that he wrote his poem to bring readers from misery to happiness. It worked for Rod Dreher. Dante saved Rod Dreher's life-and in this book, Dreher shows you how Dante can save yours.
- Sales Rank: #1335589 in Books
- Published on: 2015-06-30
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.40" h x .60" w x 5.30" l,
- Running time: 10 Hours
- Binding: MP3 CD
Review
"As a well-written chronicle of choice between the 'success' of big cities and life in the far simpler world of old traditions and deep family ties�" ---Kirkus
About the Author
Rod Dreher is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Little Way of Ruthie Leming and Crunchy Cons. He is a senior editor at The American Conservative. Rod lives in Louisiana with his family.
Sean Runnette, a multiple AudioFile Earphones Award winner, has also produced several Audie Award-winning audiobooks. His film and television appearances include Two If by Sea, Copland, Sex and the City, Law & Order, Third Watch, and lots and lots of commercials.
Most helpful customer reviews
59 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
A fellow Dante reader's Comedy
By Jordan M. Poss
I follow Rod Dreher on Twitter, read his previous book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, and read a lot of what he writes for The American Conservative, so when he began blogging through The Divine Comedy I read his posts on it with great interest. Dante’s Comedy is my favorite book and one I’ve read and reread for many years. When Dreher announced that the Comedy would be the subject of his next book I was elated, and preordered a copy. I couldn’t disagree with the title: How Dante Can Save Your Life. He has certainly changed mine. I was not surprised, reading Dreher’s columns, that he responded to it, too.
How Dante Can Save Your Life picks up in the years following the events of his other memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, which chronicles his sister’s fight with cancer. Following her death, Dreher had picked up and, after decades away from home, moved back to Louisiana, trying to reconnect and mend tattered relationships with his family. Little Way was the story of how he came to do that. How Dante Can Save Your Life is the story of how his attempt failed.
Despite returning home, Dreher recounts that his relationships with family—especially his father and nieces—were terrible. I like Dreher a lot and value his opinions, but having read his work for several years now, he strikes me as a classic oversharer. Reading Little Way, I could only wonder, despite being moved to tears, what his family thought of such a soul-baring memoir. In my experience, a tell-all—even an affectionate, nostalgic tell-all—alienates people. This book gave me an answer: “I showed Mike the manuscript of Little Way before I turned it in, and asked him to let me know if he wanted me to make any changes. He did not ask for changes, but as I learned later, the book displeased him greatly. He thought I had used his wife’s death to tell a story about myself” (30). As a reader, I too had had a hard time escaping this impression.
The resentment of his family revealed, Dreher floundered in depression, lapsed into the doldrums of persistent illness and strained his relationships with his own wife and children. He finally saw a therapist, adopted a strict prayer regimen at the insistence of his priest, and, coincidentally, picked up Dante.
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dreher writes, is not only great literature but “also immensely practical.” The Comedy begins with a fictional version of the poet lost “in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” Not one to appreciate fiction, much less poetry, Dreher identified with Dante and kept reading. Like Virgil, sent by Divine Love to lead Dante to salvation, Dante was sent to lead Dreher out of his own dark wood.
The book follows Dreher through his spiritual and physical recovery as he read through the Comedy. For Dreher, this meant salvation from alienation, broken relationships, and the misery and frustration caused by—and causing—both. Just as Dante’s journey through the revelatory levels of Hell, the suffering of Purgatory, and finally the harmonies of Paradise was, so Dreher’s journey was long, arduous, purifying, and deeply moving.
I really liked How Dante Can Save Your Life, but I still wonder about the propriety of what Dreher has chosen to share with his readers—especially considering that one of the sources of strife within his family is his previous book. Dreher writes with great feeling and sincerity but, as another reviewer has noted, the narration sometimes comes across as self-pitying, even in the later stages when he has learned how selfish he is and is striving toward greater humility. Even as he learns to let go of his bitterness and anger, he reminds himself over and over again of the incidents that made him bitter and angry.
The book also veers—just occasionally—into stereotypical self-help rhetoric. “Suffering comes to everyone,” writes Dreher. “It’s the human condition. What you do with that suffering determines whether or not you remain an earthbound caterpillar or metamorphose into a butterfly” (220). And from near the beginning of the book: “The answers and peace you seek are within you” (13), a statement completely at odds with Dante’s story of salvation through divine intervention.
But that kind of self-help cliche is only occasional, and the former problem—what makes me wonder about the propriety of Dreher’s project—is just the negative side of his candor. Dreher mostly mines solid wisdom from Dante’s rich epic, and his honesty about his own failings is the book’s strong suit most of the time.
As Dreher promoted his book I balked at the idea of treating Dante as a self-help guide. I want to value art as art, “practical” value being an unhealthy modern and particularly American obsession. Dante especially is someone with far more to say than bullet-pointed lists of self-help advice. But Dreher mostly won me over. How Dante Can Save Your Life is, importantly, “not . . . literary analysis, [but] a personal view” (xv-xvi). And Dante himself described four levels on which his art could be read and interpreted, writing that he intended his Comedy to be a hopeful work, one that would illustrate God’s salvation for people and help them toward it. After all a "comedy" is, in the medieval sense, a story with a happy ending. Dreher’s project is a continuation of that work, and for that I deeply appreciate it.
Recommended.
103 of 122 people found the following review helpful.
Skip this and read The Divine Comedy itself
By Rod Anderson
"The Divine Comedy" by Dante Aligheri is widely accepted to be one of the great works of human creativity, expressing universal truths about human nature. Anything that leads a reader to read "Divine Comedy" is a good thing. To the extent that this book, "How Dante Can Save Your Life" does that, it is useful.
Beyond that, however, it is hard to sort out exactly what this book is. The body of each chapter weaves description and summary analysis of a selected canto or two of "Divine Comedy" with autobiographical passages on how that canto (allegedly) applied to the author’s life. A text box of watered-down and not all that helpful self-help tips appears at the end of the chapter. Some credit is due the author for those portions that directly discuss "Divine Comedy" as they include interesting takes and ideas, especially in the "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" parts. But I'm generally familiar with "Divine Comedy" -- I fear somewhat for the reader of this book who has not read "Divine Comedy", as the content of this book seems to assume some level of familiarity even though it says none is assumed. So as an introduction to "Divine Comedy" to the unfamiliar, this book may work to a limited extent.
But this book is more an over-sharing autobiography than anything else. The author apparently believes that his personal journey toward healing using "Divine Comedy" will serve as an example of how the reader can do the same. But this is an odd approach: "Divine Comedy" on its own beautifully accomplishes this already, in a way that applies to all humans and all manner of sin. To view "Divine Comedy" through the glasses of one particular human necessarily distorts and diminishes its power, making it far less universal and applicable to the general reader. This distortion is magnified in the case of this book, in which that one particular human, the author himself, is portrayed as a very peculiar man with his own very peculiar issues that wouldn't seem to extrapolate well to the general reader. Not the best approach for a self-help book.
The book doesn’t work as an autobiography either, in that the reader has little reason to be interested in the author to begin with, and won’t gain much more reason from progressing through the book. Perhaps those readers who are familiar with and enjoy the author’s previous work may care about the author’s life experiences, but that makes this book largely a fan club piece instead of something more meaningful. Since I’m not in the fan club to start with, I found the autobiographical segments to be quite frustrating -- just as a chapter was getting interesting in discussing one of the cantos, here comes yet another chunk of how the author was having issues with his family. Worse yet, it’s the same issues over and over again (which are largely portrayed as the fault of his family). The whole thing rings hollow.
A final point is that this book largely ignores the primary thrust of "Divine Comedy" -- eternal punishment and reward. Perhaps this comes from the author’s attempt to appeal to non-believers. But if the goal of the author is to get the secular to read something to improve their life here, he should write about something else. The power of "Divine Comedy" is in finding God, not in avoiding stress. It isn’t about saving your life, as the title claims, it’s about saving your soul.
My suggestion to the reader who is drawn to this book: read enough of this book to get interested in reading "Divine Comedy", and then set this book aside and get started.
111 of 132 people found the following review helpful.
A Story about Rod Dreher Occasionally Flavored by Dante
By Kelly J. Hahn
I purchased this book with high hopes. I have never read Dante and liked the idea of a personal journey through a piece of classic literature. The problem is that the journey was uncomfortably personal. Dreher is way too free with his family's history, grudges, conversations and failings. He comes to the conclusion that he is to love his family whether they show him love and acceptance or not, but I fail to see how this book will do anything but further the strain or sever those relationships. I also wonder how his therapist, Mike, and his priest, Father Matthew, feel about the book and the fact that their private conversations are in it.
My biggest critique is that this book is 75% about Dreher and 25% about Dante. Dreher seems obsessed with how he thinks and reacts. Throughout the book, he uses narrative techniques to talk about himself: "I took a sip from the large plastic tumbler of ice water I kept with me at all times, since the Epstein-Barr virus left me perpetually thirsty" (p. 172). The book becomes less a testimony and more a personal narrative in which he is the hero. And he says as such (p. 219). This was distasteful. If people who talk about themselves all the time bug you, you might want to pass on this book. Dreher is the main character and everyone else--even Dante--only has a supporting role.
Dreher's analysis of Dante, when it is allowed to muscle between Dreher's storytelling and introspection, is good. I wanted more of it. I really want to read The Divine Comedy, so there is that.
Another problem with the book is that Dreher seems to have an epiphany every chapter. This is just unrealistic. He also seems to equate epiphany with growth and learning with change. Further, Dreher hears Dante in his priest's sermons, in conversations with his therapist and, well...everywhere. He takes a good thing and makes more of it than is wise. It might be in Dreher's best interests to fast from The Divine Comedy for a while.
In the end, Dreher shares too much about his family that I am guessing his family did not give him permission to share and builds a narrative around his self-obsession and reading of Dante. I can't recommend it to anyone.
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