The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl (Audio)

Synopsis
The Dante Club includes such scholars and intellectual luminaries of mid-19th-century Boston as Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell. Their attempt to introduce Dante's DIVINE COMEDY to the Harvard curriculum leads to a series of murders based on the grisly deaths in Dante's INFERNO. And it's up to the Dante Club to find the killers.

Key Details
Author:	Matthew Pearl
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Audio
Format:	Audio
ISBN-10:	0743563921
ISBN-13:	9780743563925

Additional Details
Narrated by:	John Siedman

Publisher's Note
Words can bleed.

In 1865 Boston, the members of the Dante Club, poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields, are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions onto American bookshelves will prove as corrupting as the immigrants living in Boston Harbor.

As they struggle to keep their sacred literary cause alive, the plans of the Dante Club are put in further jeopardy when a serial killer unleashes his terror on the city. Only the scholars realize that the gruesome murders are modeled on the descriptions from Dante's Inferno and its account of Hell's torturous punishments. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and outcast police officer Nicolas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, place their careers on the line in their efforts to end the killing spree. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer than they ever could have imagined.

The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante, his mythic genius, and his continued grip on the imagination.

Industry Reviews
The scope and ambition of the novel reach beyond literary scholarship and the issues and tensions surrounding the translation of Dante, to reflect on the wider issues of the age....The literary trio--Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes--are wrested from the confines of their fireside reading club to become unlikely action heroes....Pearl's affectionate recreation of these characters...and his portrait of the literary process...form the heart of the book....The story's twists and turns are well handled, but it is the sophistication and insight the author brings to the analysis of THE INFERNO that are the book's great success."
Times Literary Supplement (01/30/2004)