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How Dante Can Save Your Life

The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

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How Dante Can Save Your Life

By: Rod Dreher
Narrated by: Sean Runnette
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About this listen

Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times best-selling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod 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 audiobook, Dreher shows you how Dante can save yours.

©2015 Rod Dreher (P)2015 Tantor
Art & Literature Authors Christian Living Christianity European Literary History & Criticism Personal Development World Literature Inspiring

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Critic reviews

"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)
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I have been circling in and around Dante for over a year. This book has really encouraged me to plough on past inferno to purgatorial and paradiso

Thoroughly engaging book

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After 700 years the genius of Dante still continues to captivate minds and lead them ever deeper into the spiritual life. Lots of rich insights in this book and they are well applied to the author’s life. My only reluctance in promoting it to others would be that the author has allowed the “face of Medusa” to drive him out of full communion with the Church. I say this with both compassion and respect for the writer who makes public his struggles with great honesty. Scandal is indeed a terrible thing, but like Dante, we must have the wisdom to stand firm nonetheless.

Dante plays Virgil to a troubled soul!

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This book is a memoir of the author. It's not quite what I was expecting from the title but it was nevertheless engaging for its perspective.

Interesting

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A wonderful book if you're going through hell and you need to keep going through.

A revelatory listen

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The author Rod Dreher talks about his life, its challenges and highs and lows, and the role of faith, in the context of Dante’s life and the story Dante narrates in his classic epic poem “Divine Comedy”.
Dreher had a strained relationship with his father from childhood, as he was seen as soft and not man enough by his dad. His early life is stressed out by the stifling norms of his traditional Louisiana plantation country life.
From being a soldier, poet and also rising politician, Dante found himself in exile from Florence and threatened with execution after being on the losing side of an argument with the Church and the state. In exile, Dante wrote the Commedia about hell, purgatory and Heaven, and man’s (or woman’s) movement through these various stages. It can be seen as an act of self reflection.
In similar self-reflection, the author, a devout Orthodox Christian (and former Catholic), believes that the Divine Comedy has something for everyone, whether a Catholic or not, as its ideas of good, evil, virtue, sin and challenges are universal. He attempts to show these with examples throughout the book, from the different parts and sections of Dante’s magnum opus.
He is partially only successful in convincing, as I felt that on a few occasions his religion-based arguments and views failed to connect. It also seemed to have more than necessary share of dictums on “how to” be and think about various things, which can at best be seen as one person’s view and may not stand up as a “truth” to much logical scrutiny.
I personally didn't like the narration of this audiobook.

Good synopsis of Commedia, but not easy to connect

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