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.

A "travelogue" of sorts of the author's recent travails, challenges, and pursuit of health and reconciliation through Dante's Commedia.

The author provides a sketch of his life growing up in Louisiana and then leaving for an extended amount of time. He moved back "home" to Louisiana to try to find peace and reconcile with his family; it did not go as he planned and he came down with a terrible illness.

He happened upon Dante's Commedia and he chronicles how he was able to internalize Dante's journey toward wholeness, peace with God, self, family, his sins and difficulties, and to move toward true love.

The book certainly displays "How Dante Saved Rod Dreher's Life"; the book is very raw, visceral, and personal in its experiences, almost painfully so. If the reader cannot relate, is in a different stage of life, etc., the personal association would be easily lost. Dreher's willingness to fully immerse himself in the text and its context allows him to "experience" the text in a way that seems foreign to modern readers who tend to maintain a "respectable distance" from the subject at hand. Such does not make an experiential reading wrong, but it can seem foreign to those not used to that type of paradigm.

Dreher admits that the role Dante served for him could be served by other authors and texts for others; he makes a good appeal for us to prove willing to internalize good literature and learn from its wisdom and experience. Nevertheless many of the lessons he obtained from Dante could have easily been obtained from the Bible or other sources; as a Christian I would hope that believers would first find their inspiration from the Biblical text, appreciate the later works of others, but rely principally on the words of God to effect personal transformation. As an ex-Methodist ex-Catholic convert to Orthodoxy Dreher provides an interesting perspective on faith and liturgy; that background explains why he is more sympathetic to Dante and his doctrines than many others would.

A good if overly personal exploration into Dante's Commedia and the power of literature and stories for personal transformation.

**--book received as part of early review program ( )