Scope and Contents San Francisco Chronicle Review: Creative people who don't write sometimes enjoy a honeymoon with the press -- right up until they put pen to paper. It happened with Madonna. She used to give interviews saying what an old-fashioned girl she really was at heart, how all she'd really like to do was find a nice writer and settle down. Consequently, she barely ever saw a bad review -- until she made the mistake of writing her first book. Critics promptly saw they'd been kidding themselves all along, and they turned on her. So when word got around that the visionary California painter and book artist Sandow Birk was not just illustrating but co-writing a new adaptation of Dante's "Divine Comedy," some of us who cherish his work feared the worst. Sure, he could concoct historical canvases, sketches and propaganda posters about a bloody civil war between San Francisco and Los Angeles, as he did with "In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias." And OK, he...

Scope and Contents

Following the acclaim for their innovative edition of Dante's Inferno, Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders guide us to the next level of the afterlife in Dante's Purgatorio. The second book of Dante Alighieri's classic poem The Divine Comedy, this version of Purgatorio couples a clever literary adaptation incorporating modern urban speech and contemporary references with powerful illustrations inspired by Gustave Dore's famous engravings. Whereas Inferno was primarily situated in a city that bears a curious resemblance to modern Los Angeles, Purgatorio is set in a surreal San Francisco Bay Area, an outlandish and hopeful milieu for those who have a chance to wash their sins away. Together, the sardonic yet playful combination of text and images comprise a vivid retelling of this masterpiece. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.