Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club

Heard of this book but wasn't too sure what it was about. Back cover seemed interesting...kind of historical fictional mystery. Was kind of hoping that maybe it fell into the Caleb Carr mold. Unfortunately it wasn't as captivating as a Carr book but was an interesting period piece detailing Boston in the 1860s. I do believe history is terrible at teaching "complete" history. What I mean is, in history class we all study what led to the Civil War, the war itself, reconstruction, blah blah but what we don't study is what was going on socially, intellectually, or scientifically. Take 1865 for instance, Lewis Carroll publishes Alice in Wonderland, the Salvation Army is established, the Matterhorn in the alps is first climbed, Mendel formulates his genetic inheritance traits. Lot more went on in 1865 then just the Civil War ending. Anyway my point in all of this was beside the "whodunit" the book was interesting in that Longfellow, Holmes, Lovell, and Greene were all part of the novel. Basically the story revolves around Longfellow completing the first Americanized English version of Dante's The Divine Comedy. Wrap this into a fictional murder spree in Boston and you get this book. Overall okay just not riveting and kind of slow in places.