How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem (2015)

By Rod Dreher

I’m not a big fan of self-help books. To be fair, of course, there’s nothing wrong with them, and I’m sure they help a lot of people. But none of them, however valuable they look like they might be, ever hold my attention long enough for me to get anything of worth out of them. This book is not, strictly speaking, a “self-help book,” but the extended title rightly hints that it does share a lot in common with that genre, taking the novel approach of describing how a 700-year-old medieval Italian poem helped modern conservative commentator Rod Dreher to put his life back on track after what I would term (he does not) a nervous breakdown, a total emotional meltdown that was wrecking even his physical health, which readers of the quasi-prequel memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, would not have expected as imminent.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (2013)

By Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher is another recent discovery whom I’m somewhat surprised not to have encountered earlier – or if I did, the name didn’t stick.  I do a good bit – far too much, if the truth be told – of what I call “net’surfing,” tending to concentrate in the more conservative political and religious corners of the Internet, but The American Conservative is not a site that I make a point to visit unless I’m taken there by some link that looks interesting. Nonetheless, given the subject matter which Dreher tends to write about, I’d be surprised if one or more of those interesting-looking links would not have taken me to something by him from time to time. Nevertheless, I don’t recall his name impressing itself upon my consciousness until just a couple of months ago. I was visiting with my mother, and we were watching The World Over on EWTN. That night, host Raymond Arroyo was interviewing guest Dreher, specifically about his most recently published book, How Dante Can Save Your Life (which I am currently reading).