Dante Books

This book was originally written (and reprinted several times) in Italian by the wife of Inventor and Statesman Guglielmo Marconi, and in recent years was translated to english by his daughter Elettra, who also added some important recollections. Guglielmo Marconi was the first to discover how to send a sound made in one box, to another box on the other side of the room.
This technology was then used by others, as it still is today, in inventions that involve wireless communication, such as satellite communication and radios.
He was Nobel Prize winner. He was credited with saving the lives of survivors on the Titanic because he installed the radio transmission on that ship. He conceived of, and built the Vatican Radio Station which is still a powerful communications tool for the world's millions of Roman Catholics.
Read it!

Who invented the wireless radio? Well as we are taught in history class Marconi did. Now what else do we know about him? More or less very little, that was until now. This book is an exceptional look into one of this century greatest men.

Written by Marconi's wife, this book is more than a simple biography, it is a love story, and it is a romance novel and most importantly it is history lesson all rolled into 370 plus pages of one of the best books I have ever read or reviewed.

The books tells more than the life work of the "man who gave voice to silence", it shows another side, this side history books never record. The book includes letter, pictures and even a listing of his honors.

Here is a book that should be on the must read list for those interested in history. I was truly impressed by the way the author makes the man come to life and shows his triumphs and his failures. Excellent reading for one and all!

short description:

This is the first book on Dante's metaphysical understanding of reality, and on how that understanding, centered on the concepts of creation, non-duality, and self-knowledge, grounds the Comedy's poetics, cosmology, and travelogue, gives meaning to its claims to be true or revelatory, and dissolves the distinction between poetry and theology in the poem.


longer description:

Christian Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and of the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. He carries this out through a detailed examination of three notoriously complex cantos of the Paradiso, read against the background of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian tradition from which they arise.

Dante's metaphysics--his understanding of reality--is very different from our own. To present Dante's ideas about the cosmos, or God, or salvation, or history, or poetry within the context of post-Enlightenment presuppositions, as is usually done, is thus to capture only imperfectly the essence of those ideas. The recovery of Dante's metaphysics is also essential, Moevs argues, if we are to resolve what has been called "the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy." That problem is what to make of the Comedy's claim to the "status of revelation, vision, or experiential record--as something more than imaginative literature."

Moevs finds the key to the Comedy's metaphysics and poetics in the concept of creation, which implies three fundamental insights into the nature of reality: 1) The world (finite being) is radically contingent, dependent at every instant on what gives it being. 2) The relation between the world and the ground of its being is non-dualistic (God is not a thing, and there is nothing the world is "made of"). 3) Human beings are radically free, unbound by the limits of nature, and thus can come to experience themselves as encompassing all space and time. These insights are the foundation of the pilgrim Dante's journey from the center of the world to the Empyrean which contains it.

For Dante, in sum, what we perceive as reality, the spatio-temporal world, is a creation or projection of conscious being, which can only be known as oneself. Moevs argues that self-knowledge is in fact the keystone of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophical tradition, and the essence of the Christian revelation in which that tradition culminates. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy. In particular, it becomes clear that poetry coincides with theology and philosophy in the poem: Dante poeta cannot be distinguished from Dante theologus.

And the book is definitely worth 5 stars! (That's not on the book jacket.) : )

Moevs poses a critical warning: you cannot "understand the Comedy simply because (you) are familiar with Christian or Scholastic Doctrine". What is needed, Moevs convincingly demonstrates, is to rid ourselves of "post-Renaissance, empiricist" assumptions; e.g. mind-body dualism, creation/causation as a series of temporal events, idealism versus realism/Neo-Platonism versus Aristotle.

The path that Moevs provides is a rigorous but clearly written intellectual and comparative history of the ideas that informed late-medieval understandings and make them radically different than those of "modern" philosophy. Do not assume that you have walked this path. Neither Ozanam's beautifully written "Dante and Catholic Philosophy", written to assert Dante's orthodoxy, nor Gilson's "Dante and Philosophy", written to "define Dante's attitudes ... not to...look for their sources", provide the historical and analytic depth of Moevs' text. Moevs' text is indeed "the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy".

Moevs has reproduced his own journey to a fuller understanding of Dante's Comedy and the philosophies that inform it and make it meaningful to us. His readers owe Christian Moevs a gracious and sincere Thank You!

This book provides a fantastic guide to the Inferno. It made reading the Inferno 100% more meaningful and enjoyable for me. An absolute must for anyone reading the Inferno!!

A Modern Readers Guide changed my life! By far the best resource for understanding Dante. A must read!

Cristogianni Borsella is making a name for himself as a major research historian. In On Persecution, Identity & Activism: Aspects of the Italian-American Experience from the Late 19th Century to Today, he not only again shares his brilliant research and writing talents, but he also shares his personal thoughts and feelings on issues of racial prejudice and persecution, and how these issues are influenced and promulgated through the media.

I enjoy reading Borsella's research. While his main goal is to highlight his Italian-American heritage, his research is well rounded and encompassing. And the proof of his efforts is that there is new information that will undoubtedly teach his readers, including myself, about the atrocities faced by Italians in America (as well as similar information on other groups, including African-Americans, American Indians, Jewish, Irish, Japanese, et.al., normally non-white.

Indeed Part I of this book provides complete information documenting that Italian-Americans have been the third most persecuted minority in U.S. History! Here are just a few random selections of the little-known facts provided:

From 1870-1940, Italians were the second most lynched ethnicity, second only to African-Americans.
Sicilians were the largest group in New Orleans and were singled out as the most dangerous class and blamed for practically all the murders that took place.
During the last decade of the 19th century, according to the Commissioner of Labor, "one-third of all Italians in the four largest cities in the country were living in deplorable poverty.
The Mafia stereotype was greatly responsible for the many lynchings, and all Italians were accused either directly or by implication.
During WWII, 600,000 people of Italian background had their rights besieged by the U. S. government.
Part II of Borsella's book moves into greater detail about the identity and assimilation of Italians into America. I think the question "Are Italians White?" which is explored, is the most telling of the racism that continues even today. Borsella explores how the issue of "color" really has no bearing when discussing ethnic issues since immigrants from Italy, as well as other countries, have a range of skin colorings.

In an unexpected twist, Borsella has included his own personal activism activities, including actual on-line arguments he has shared, which made his book just a little different and more interesting. When individuals choose to learn about their heritage and celebrate it, it is important that truthful, factual information is available. One of the controversial areas for Italian-Americans has been the exploration and call for the elimination of Columbus Day.

Inclusion of these more recent issues brought a new understanding to Borsella's title! I sometimes wonder how we have come to be known as "the melting pot" when there are still so many fighting for vested interests by overriding historical fact. Indeed, Columbus was the discoverer of American. Just as all peoples have performed atrocities, this cannot and should not negate actual events. Borsella's inclusion of this issue is an excellent exploration of the arguments for and against the celebration of this day.

Finally, Borsella takes issue with television, movies and other media who have stereotyped all Italian-Americans under the umbrella of being part of organized crime, highlighting that the latest series, The Sopranos, illustrates the continuous illusion that can only serve to continue the defamation of an entire ethnic group.

Personally, I applaud everything that was covered in this book. Given the issues of immigration that are in today's headlines, this book just may be a must-read as you explore your own feelings about today and tomorrow's headlines.

"On Persecution, Identity & Activism: Aspects of the Italian-American Experience from the Late 19th Century to Today," could easily be called a new classic of Cultural Studies. Containing contemporary sources of information such as chat room debates, listserv posting and web page persuasion, "On Persecution," reveals the past with present means to better the future. This book clearly dispels the politically correct myth of easy assimilation into the American Dream. By examining the history of the Italian peoples in America, Cristogianni Borsella enlightens the current debate on illegal immigration of Mexicans crossing our southern most border. They don't want to assimilate. They work the jobs no American wants. They're dirty, uneducated and criminals. These claims are not new or unique to the Mexicans. Borsella documents these same remarks as applied to the new immigrants from Italy of the nineteenth century.

"On Persecution" is a Picasso of American and American-Italian histories. Uneven and at times odd, the work contains many sharp angles that at first appear disjointed. Yet together the pages form a complete whole, a needed presence in contemporary ethnic scholarship. "On Persecution" contains six chapters, four appendices, endnotes, a bibliography and an index, so it could serve a teacher well in the classroom. It is easy to read, and at times the personality of the author is so immediate and delightful, the reader may sense he is prying into a personal diary. Such personality makes the book flow quickly even when the narrative evaporates into lists and documentation.

The strengths of the book are many. First, Borsella sets forth a persuasive case that Italian immigrants have been a persecuted minority group in the United States. Over a hundred pages serve to chronicle cases of execution, lynching and defamations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Second, this work illustrates that generalizations and contemporary categorizations seldom fit well upon the facts of history. Borsella uses the history of the Italian immigrants to discuss the social construction of race, white identity and assimilation differences by generations. His work is sure to disrupt the reader's assumptions concerning the working of the American society. Countering the notion of European white privilege, Borsella presents Italians as "historically black" documenting American societal segregation habits of preventing Italian children from attending white schools, requiring Italians to sit in the back rows of movie theatres, and American churches isolating Italians from the main fellowship by ushering them into garages and dank church basements. Third, the book raises serious questions concerning identity construction and negotiation, societal perception, and the media's role in influencing American culture.

Specifically from a Communication perspective "On Persecution" would be an asset to any Com scholar's library for a variety of reasons. The work is a journey of discovery. The author describes his own, almost religious awakening to his ethnic heritage. This journey is unselfishly shared by an author who makes his thoughts most transparent. The genuineness of the tour guide provides and effective ethos to his overall argument. Furthermore, a gift of this text is the serious respect it gives to contemporary communication forms. Borsella's fruitful use of chat room debates and webpage postings challenge traditional scholarship's lack of attention to the same. Another aspect I enjoyed were the historic pictures and cultural snapshots of Italian Americans integrated throughout the book.

The negatives of the book do not overshadow the many positives. His chapters are uneven, with chapter six containing four pages while chapter two is close to a hundred pages. The chapters are not units of though - some contain one major idea while other contain several key ideas, and in other chapters I could discern no overarching theme. Chapter titles would have helped, and a better editor could have made organizational suggestions to strengthen and balance the chapters. Indeed, these are minor grievances, especially when one recognizes that this is Borsella's first nonfiction book.

He begins his introduction of material with a discussion of several immigrant groups such as the Japanese, Chinese and the Jews to illustrate persecution in America is by no means rare. He then moves on to provide background for the marginalization of the Italian immigrants. Next Borsella offers a chronology of discrimination against Italians before discussing Senator Estes Kefauver's Crime Committee hearings of the 1950's that linked Italians and crime in the mind of the public. The fourth chapter deals with the construction of race and presents an online debate over the historical question of whether Italians are white. From there he examines the role of the media through television stereotypes, Mafia movies and news coverage of Columbus Day repudiations. The work ends with a reflective Epilogue on forgetfulness and the diaphanous nature of Italian inequity.

I haven't read Esolen's Inferno, but his translation of Purgatory was superb--not just the translation itself but the notes, which I'm fairly certain Esolen wrote. After translating the Inferno, the Purgatory, and then the Paradise, Esolen was stimulated to write a magnificent interpretative introduction to the Paradise which is one of the best pieces I've ever read on Dante.

Esolen's Introduction to the Paradise ranks with Erich Auerbach's essays on Dante in Mimesis and Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, and I prefer it to T. S. Eliot's famous essay on Dante; it is a classic. Esolen's introduction to the Paradise in this edition is alone worth the price of the book, and I would characterise it as a must-read for anyone interested in Dante and his Comedy.

As with the previous volumes of the Comedy, in the Paradise Esolen again proves himself to be a sensitive and judicious translator, and the notes are again excellent.

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
"The Divine Comedy" describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and another of his works, "La Vita Nuova." While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin or Greek (the languages of Church and antiquity). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be comedic in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, the progression of Dante's pilgrim from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: Each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternate meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem (see the "Letter to Can Grande della Scala"), he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory (the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical). The structure of the poem, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of "L'Inferno", allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" added later in the 16th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were of everyday or vulgar subjects, while High poems were for more serious matters. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of man, in the low and vulgar Italian language and not the Latin language as one might expect for such a serious topic.

Paradiso
After an initial ascension (Canto I), Beatrice guides Dante through the nine spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, similar to Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see. Thus, the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's own personal vision, ambiguous in its true construction. The addition of a moral dimension means that a soul that has reached Paradise stops at the level applicable to it. Souls are allotted to the point of heaven that fits with their human ability to love God. Thus, there is a heavenly hierarchy. All parts of heaven are accessible to the heavenly soul. That is to say all experience God but there is a hierarchy in the sense that some souls are more spiritually developed than others. This is not determined by time or learning as such but by their proximity to God (how much they allow themselves to experience him above other things). It must be remembered in Dante's schema that all souls in Heaven are on some level always in contact with God.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
"The Divine Comedy" describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and another of his works, "La Vita Nuova." While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin or Greek (the languages of Church and antiquity). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be comedic in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, the progression of Dante's pilgrim from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: Each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternate meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem (see the "Letter to Can Grande della Scala"), he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory (the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical). The structure of the poem, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of "L'Inferno", allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" added later in the 16th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were of everyday or vulgar subjects, while High poems were for more serious matters. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of man, in the low and vulgar Italian language and not the Latin language as one might expect for such a serious topic.

Paradiso
After an initial ascension (Canto I), Beatrice guides Dante through the nine spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, similar to Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see. Thus, the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's own personal vision, ambiguous in its true construction. The addition of a moral dimension means that a soul that has reached Paradise stops at the level applicable to it. Souls are allotted to the point of heaven that fits with their human ability to love God. Thus, there is a heavenly hierarchy. All parts of heaven are accessible to the heavenly soul. That is to say all experience God but there is a hierarchy in the sense that some souls are more spiritually developed than others. This is not determined by time or learning as such but by their proximity to God (how much they allow themselves to experience him above other things). It must be remembered in Dante's schema that all souls in Heaven are on some level always in contact with God.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

Calling all literary readers and writers! This is a must-read for you! Romeo and Juliet, as edited by Adolph Caso and published by the Dante University of America Foundation.

This is not a text; no, it is so much more. Personally, I found it a most rewarding adventure into my favorite activity--reading! Long before we had copyright laws that constrain creativity rather than elicit it, the storytellers of the times were able to hear a tale of wonder, enjoy it, explore it and then regurgitate it into an even greater masterpiece or, sometimes, into a moving poem, an artistic rendition of the story, or even a musical!

All of us have picked up a book and upon reading the first few pages may think that they have read it already--the theme is similar--but then the book takes off into an entirely different tale. Here, however, Adolph Caso brings to his readers what I have come to think of as "the evolution of the Romeo and Juliet story."

Caso has brought together the works of Masuccio Salernitano, Luigi DaPorto, Matteo Bandello, all Italian writers, inasmuch as the story originated in Italy--and William Shakespeare. You see, Shakespeare did not create and write Romeo and Juliet! Did you know that?

According to the Introduction, written by the editor, "a variant on the theme of Romeo and Juliet can be traced to the literatures of Greece and Rome, it received a unique and modern rendition with Masuccio Salernitan's thirty-third short story... It was amplified and modernized by Luigi DaPorto... given its definitive form by Matteo Bandello," and "immortalized by Shakespeare with his great masterpiece." (p. 7)

So what this book provides is the ability to study the same story, by four different authors. Personally, I prefer the story written by Matteo Bandello. By the way, Maurice Jonas translated the stories. I felt that Bandello's story probably more closely followed the actual story (Was this ever based upon a true story? I don't know).

The main thrust of the storyline is that while two families were feuding, a young girl of one family and a young man of the other family met purely by accident and fall in love!

All of the Italian versions place Juliet's age at 18, while Shakespeare moved the age to a much younger one. All of the Italian versions indicate that Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end, while Shakespeare's rendition also includes that the man to whom Juliet was to be married, as arranged by her father, was also dead.

The style of poetic writing by Shakespeare is, of course, completely different from all of the others, and, indeed, is expansive in telling the story. It includes beautifully written passages that most of us have heard at one time or another:

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east and Juliet is the sun!...

As well as,

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?... (pps. 121-122)

This change in writing style by Shakespeare is exactly why I feel the book is a must-read for literary readers and writers. For it is in the reading, study and digestion of the evolved Romeo and Juliet that we may see and understand all that this beautiful story has to tell us.

Indeed, for those unfamiliar with the works of Shakespeare, this is a wonderful way by which you can begin--for the earlier versions ensure that you are totally familiar with the storyline before you begin the story as written by William Shakespeare.

I highly recommend Romeo and Juliet, not only as a wonderful novel, but also as a wonderful study in the writing and evolution of great literature.

I like how they are both different meaning different back grounds and how they didn't let the family stop their love for each other.

T.S. Eliot raises some intriguing questions in Choruses from the Rock concerning the knowledge we may lose in information or the wisdom we may lose in knowledge. Patricia Sloane's book belies these losses, for in her book no knowledge is lost in information and no wisdom is lost in knowledge. This book is by far the most amazing piece of scholarship it has ever been my pleasure to come across. Ostensibly about a couple of Eliot's early poems, the book is packed with insights into so many different threads of history and literary history that it would be impossible to list them all even in a much longer review. I would not hesitate in calling Patricia Sloane the most careful reader of them all. The book is full of surprises every step of the way, and the surprises always strike the reader as exemplifying the art of reading at its very best. I would call what Patricia Sloane does the art of "corrective" reading, for she shows us in innumerable and always highly convincing ways that readers who have found innuendoes of anti-Semitism in some of T.S. Eliot's poems have simply missed the point. The so-called anti-Semitic passages are actually criticisms of anti-Semitism, occasionally in the most playful of ways. One of the things this amazingly scholarly and wonderfully readable book does is to explore and expose the nature of prejudicial readings that find fault not because the fault is in the text but because they read the fault into the text. Patricia Slaone traces with easy-going relentlessness all the intricate connections that can possibly be found in Eliot's poems - between Eliot and Dante, on the one hand, or Eliot and James Joyce, on the other. These connections then highlight innumerable others, implicating Homer as well as the Bible in refreshing new connections that finally culminate in the largest possible context the human mind is capable of holding. While reading this book I kept saying "yes, of course," though what I found myself assenting to is not so much an example of Alexander Pope's famous observation about what often was thought but never so well expressed, but a completely new arrangement of this observation, for reading Patricia Sloane's first volume in a projected trilogy strikes the reader more in the nature of what never was thought until Patricia Slaone has finally expressed it. And now that she has, we cannot help but think it. Her book on T.S. Eliot is probably the best out there. I am certainly looking forward to the volumes to follow.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Eliot's poetic method in general, especially of the earlier work, and obviously the Bleistein poems in particular. A must read for any academic whose work touches upon (supposed) anti-Semitism, the Bleistein and Sweeney poems, and Eliot's method of allusion and satire. I'm looking forward to reading the next two volumes in the series of which this is the first.

Arwin

(Shyamal Bagchee, who wrote the introduction, is the Vice-President of the T. S. Eliot Society and the founder of the Yeats-Eliot Review.)

Dante's Vita Nuova is an unusual work: Dante alternates between verse passages, describing his love for Beatrice, and prose passages which comment critically and meditatively on the verses. This edition of the work provides editor Mark Musa's translation of the prose and verse passages, plus the original Italian text of the verses. Moreover, the second half of the book contains a comprehensive critical analysis and essay by Mark Musa running to 120 pages. So this volume is an all-in-one text-and-commentary edition.

Dante's Vita Nuova is an unusual work: Dante alternates between verse passages, describing his love for Beatrice, and prose passages which comment critically and meditatively on the verses. This edition of the work provides editor Mark Musa's translation of the prose and verse passages, plus the original Italian text of the verses. Moreover, the second half of the book contains a comprehensive critical analysis and essay by Mark Musa running to 120 pages. So this volume is an all-in-one text-and-commentary edition.

A shocking revelation on how even a modern human being can explore his/herself through the eyes and the sensitivity of a Middle Age poet. It interlaces psycology and common view- past, present and future if possible - of the world and at the same time uses the eternal characters of Dante's Divine Comedy to lead a common man/woman through the inner depths of our souls and social stands to show how everyone can recognize what should be pursued in terms of moral values, of political significance ( yes, today's politics as well for man is the same through the ages...) and what should be recognized as part of our instinctual side and should be accepted and not just rejected or exorcised (as if we were closing our eyes before our bad sides...).
Unique reading. Mind taking.

This Book is of an old part of the City of Buffalo where my ancestors, my great-grandparents first settled in circa 1890. It depicts the setion of the city referred to as "The Hooks".