Matthew W W itibaren 66040 Rosello CH, İtalya
If you've never read the full Divine Comedy you have missed one of Western civilization's most impactful works. There is nothing further I can say about this grandiloquent verse that has not been said already by more educated minds than mine. Read it--you'll be doing yourself a favor.
I liked about the first two thirds of this book, and then the ending does something that you're supposed to believe the novel has been setting you up for all along, but I don't buy it. It's too automatic, and unconvincing. But in terms of reading it for insight into geisha culture and Japan, fascinating stuff.
Language can expand or contract our experience of the world. Rheingold has assembled a collection of words from cultures other than American for which there are no English equivalents. That meaningful look exchanged between two people, for instance, has a word to express it in Tierra del Fuegan. In Sanskrit, there is a word for the confusion between a symbol and the reality it represents. Learning words for things we have difficulty even describing in English, or for which we lack even concepts, such as the Japanese word for a flawed detail that creates an elegant whole, piqued my mind and made me stretch to imagine different ways to view the world.