Please go Google this phrase right now.
For a good laugh, fire up Google and type in the phrase "Self-indulgent sentimental, whiny drivel that stretches analogies till they snap".
Or if you are lazy, just click here.
Then check out the top link.
Bwahaha!!!
ReplyDeleteBTW I no longer wonder how this tripe garners so many 5-star reviews. I recently read one of those NYT Bestseller motivational business books. Amazon reviewers lavished this thing with 5-star reviews. But for me (and a few other discerning reviewers, cough cough) it was dreck. Poorly written, simplistic, sophomoric dreck. What can I tell ya? A lot of people seem to have the taste and discernment of a banana slug. And many of those people write reviews at Amazon.
Out of curiosity I read one of the 5-stars. It began: "How Dante Can Save Your Life is a book about finding ourselves..."
DeleteThat was quite enough.
I agree that the book review by Rod Anderson "rodander"on June 25, 2015, was a fair assessment of HDCSYL. I would rather read Dante. And I plan on reading Comedia again (I have read it twice so far).
ReplyDeleteSomeone once said something like "Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There are no others."
Here is good quote from the review:
Rod Anderson: 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.
In which Dreher discusses attending two days of a Dante seminar in Siena during the time of the Palio horse race. Two points jump out:
ReplyDelete1) Seems a little late for him to learn about Dante, since his book came out a couple months earlier. Oh well, as long as he could slide it past the Mrs. and the publisher (or at least the IRS), it's hard to pass up a goozlepipe stuffing with a hairy male companion.
2) But it turns out it wasn't only sliding it past the wife and the publisher: you and I paid for part of this too. To wit, this plea appears, need I say on the pages of "The" "American" "Conservative":
So, it was a shock to learn from Ron Herzman that this summer’s program would be the last one in Siena. Wait … what?! True. The National Endowment for the Humanities will still fund the program, but won’t be funding it overseas. I’m not completely sure about this, but the sense seems to be that there’s political pressure from Congress not to be spending taxpayer dollars on humanities programs that take place on foreign soil.
If true, this is a shocking waste of an opportunity, and the sacrifice of an excellent program at the altar of a dull-witted political correctness....
... Please, NEH, reconsider the wisdom of ending the program in Siena. Because what happened in Siena, and in Tuscany of the late medieval period, was so important to understanding Dante’s world, it matters deeply to Western civilization. Siena’s history is our own, in a real way. Don’t cut off future groups of American teachers from the blessing of studying Dante and his world in Siena. The NEH program in Siena makes the abstract concrete. There is nothing else like it. It is a treasure. So let’s treasure it.
Time for Harry Reid to bring out the cowboy poetry speech again, I guess.