Dante's Inferno

I bought this book, because I was enticed by the artwork, and it turns out that is the only real reason to read it. Birk's Dante's Inferno is a modern refashioning of the Inferno with detailed illustrations translating the Dante's Hell into a decaying, commercially saturated, urban wasteland reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. The cover painting and the engravings inside are beautiful (in that way that Hell and abandoned freeway underpasses can be) and a fun re-interpretation of Gustave Dore's 19th century illustrations. The text, on the other hand, is just lame. With awkward insertions of contemporary figures, such as Bill Clinton, Thabo Mbeki, and Dionne Warwick, and such glowing sentences from Dante's mouth as “I was bummed for him,” Birk's modern translation is an insult to the original. I think this book would have been better if he had just left the text as is. I would not have minded the incongruency between illustration and text as much as I did the mediocre word-smithery. Skim the book for the pictures, but read a more traditional tradition for the Dante.