Books in Brief

Dante, by Thomas G. Bergin (Orion Press, $6.50). Commemorating the seventh centennial of the birth of il miglio fabbro del parlar materno, Professor Bergin has written an elegant and instructive handbook for initiate dantisti. With a marked facility for condensation that makes no concessions to aridity or opacity, he guides the reader through the medieval religious and political mazes of Europe and Italy, ■presents a brief and vivid portrait of Florence around the ideal year of 1300, and a biography of Alighieri, the man, the reader, and the maker. With this much in the way of prologue, the book is given over chiefly to lucid exegeses of the works, with emphasis upon form and language. The divine Commedia—“the greatest poem of our tradition”—receives the full attention of the four final chapters and is discussed in terms of narrative, allegory, doctrine, and technique. Precisely figured maps and charts reveal the grand order which the medieval mind projected upon its cosmos. No claims are made for critical innovations, but the sureness with which the author bears his scholarship and the ease with which he engages the reader’s interest are virtues requiring no justification; and the breadth of his view makes this guide as valuable to the devotee of Chaucer or the Provencal poets as to the student beginning his reading in Dante. r. bemxs

The Road to the White House—The Story of the 1964 Election by the Staff of the New York Times, edited by Harold Faber (McGraw-Hill, $6.95). Still another account of the 1964 campaign (both pre-and post-convention). This one is a husky volume based largely on contemporary dispatches by the Times own reporters and columnists, stitched into a continuous narrative and fleshed out with explanatory material. The result has both the advantages and the disadvantages of the method: it contains just about everything the Times deemed fit to print on the subject (which was plenty), but lacks the slightest creative verve or sparkle of its own. The bias is there, of course (on a single page, the editors manage to sneer that the Illinois primary gave Goldwater “only 63 per cent” of the votes, while crediting Rockefeller with “at least a psychological blow” because, running unopposed in the West Virginia primary, he “won the approval of two-thirds of the voters”), but then it would hardly be the Times if it weren’t. A certain discreet selectivity is also apparent: James Reston is quoted extensively, but the book tactfully omits his historic blooper of April 12, 1964, when he declared that Rockefeller “has about as much chance of losing the Republican nomination as he has of going broke.” (Perhaps, that day, Mr. Reston was not speaking ex cathedra.) On those rare occasions when the mighty Times simply missed the story, the editors have quite properly remedied the oversight by cribbing from better-in-formed sources—as when, in recounting the early history of the draft-Goldwater movement, they devote three solid pages to quoting and paraphrasing an article in a small but knowledgeable journal called NATIONAL REVIEW.

Featured Tags

Manage following

Literature

Presidential Election

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

National Review

Dante, by Thomas G. Bergin (Orion Press, $6.50). Commemorating the seventh centennial of the birth of il miglio fabbro del parlar materno, Professor Bergin has written an elegant and instructive handbook for initiate dantisti. With a marked facility for condensation that makes no concessions to aridity or opacity, he guides the reader through the medieval religious and political mazes of Europe and Italy, ■presents a brief and vivid portrait of Florence around the ideal year of 1300, and a biography of Alighieri, the man, the reader, and the maker. With this much in the way of prologue, the book is given over chiefly to lucid exegeses of the works, with emphasis upon form and language. The divine Commedia—“the greatest poem of our tradition”—receives the full attention of the four final chapters and is discussed in terms of narrative, allegory, doctrine, and technique. Precisely figured maps and charts reveal the grand order which the medieval mind projected upon its cosmos. No claims are made for critical innovations, but the sureness with which the author bears his scholarship and the ease with which he engages the reader’s interest are virtues requiring no justification; and the breadth of his view makes this guide as valuable to the devotee of Chaucer or the Provencal poets as to the student beginning his reading in Dante. r. bemxs

The Road to the White House—The Story of the 1964 Election by the Staff of the New York Times, edited by Harold Faber (McGraw-Hill, $6.95). Still another account of the 1964 campaign (both pre-and post-convention). This one is a husky volume based largely on contemporary dispatches by the Times own reporters and columnists, stitched into a continuous narrative and fleshed out with explanatory material. The result has both the advantages and the disadvantages of the method: it contains just about everything the Times deemed fit to print on the subject (which was plenty), but lacks the slightest creative verve or sparkle of its own. The bias is there, of course (on a single page, the editors manage to sneer that the Illinois primary gave Goldwater “only 63 per cent” of the votes, while crediting Rockefeller with “at least a psychological blow” because, running unopposed in the West Virginia primary, he “won the approval of two-thirds of the voters”), but then it would hardly be the Times if it weren’t. A certain discreet selectivity is also apparent: James Reston is quoted extensively, but the book tactfully omits his historic blooper of April 12, 1964, when he declared that Rockefeller “has about as much chance of losing the Republican nomination as he has of going broke.” (Perhaps, that day, Mr. Reston was not speaking ex cathedra.) On those rare occasions when the mighty Times simply missed the story, the editors have quite properly remedied the oversight by cribbing from better-in-formed sources—as when, in recounting the early history of the draft-Goldwater movement, they devote three solid pages to quoting and paraphrasing an article in a small but knowledgeable journal called NATIONAL REVIEW.