Reviews and Comments

The Divine Comedy was a very interesting read. It's the kind of story you see return in some form in movies, books, games or music, particularly Dante's Inferno. I was mostly interested in reading it because I wanted to see what The Divine Comedy is all about and why it was so influential. However, Longfellow's translation was definitely the wrong choice for me. It felt like a very literal translation of each canto and it just didn't work for me. I can see the worth in having a literal translation of each Canto, a kind of "preservation across languages", but I feel like it just loses the spirit of the text for a lack of a better word. I wish I would have read a more poetic translation than a literal one.

I also would have liked an explanation at the end of each canto, which I know certain editions of the Divine Comedy have. Mine had none of that (I have the Barnes and Noble collectible hardcover) and some context would have helped with the more local figures Dante meets throughout his journey. The illustrations were beautiful though and helped paint an image of the things Dante encounters. All in all, I'm glad I got to read the Divine Comedy at last, but I regret not looking into the different translations more because I would have avoided Longfellow's or Norton's translation.

I bought this book as a refresher on topics I learned years ago for a state exam on Physics. Unfortunately, I think videos would be much better than this book for learning physics or as 'refresher courses'.

My biggest problem with the book is that for me it just didn't work. The chapters are lessons Feynman taught as a professor but I think that's where the should have stayed at, being recorded as lectures. The explanations would probably work as a lecture, but in the book I felt like they were taking too long to get to the point. I get the point some of these explanations are trying to make, there is a lot of 'building up the logic behind the experiments.' For example, the final chapter Quantum Physics explains and builds the logic of the uncertainty principle through three double-slit experiments. First using bullets, then waves of water, and finally electrons. Personally, it just strained my attention because it took too long to get to the point. For the novelty of a Feynman lecture in paper format, I think his actual lectures (found on Youtube, for example) are just better.

My second problem with it is that there are quite a few diagrams, but the text just couldn't 'keep up.' This might just be an issue with my edition, but it was quite annoying to backtrack several pages to review the diagrams while the text explained them. In the fifth chapter Gravitation, the text could not keep up with the images, sometimes referring to images three pages ahead. It's not that it's hard to follow, it's just that it's tedious in my opinion. So unfortunately, the book just didn't work for me.