How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

Rod Dreher’s pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven via Dante’s Divine Comedy offers a practical guide to thinking through your own problems and challenges. Dreher will show how Dante’s spiritual, moral, and psychological insights can help ordinary people find their way from confusion to happiness and peace.

Following the death of his little sister, journalist Rod Dreher wrote a best-selling memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, of pain, loss, and redemption. Despite the book's success he is confronted with another personal crisis—one that would destroy his health and send him into a spiral of depression. That is when Dreher happened upon a cobwebbed copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy in a secondhand bookstore. Over the following weeks, he would join the author on a vivid, wrenching, and ultimately healing pilgrimage through Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, discovering that the medieval masterpiece offers a surprisingly practical way of reimagining and confronting your own problems. A potent mixture of Alain De Botton's massive bestseller How Proust Can Change Your Life and Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life—a touch of trenchant literary criticism with a heavy helping of spiritual insight—Dreher has written a practical book meant for those who find themselves untethered and lost in the modern world. He reveals Dante’s penetrating (but often hidden) spiritual, moral, and psychological insights, showing how they can deliver the reader from misery and confusion to happiness and peace. Dante saved Rod Dreher's life; now he details, in crisp, jargon-free prose, how he can save yours.