In Defense of Love: An Argument

by Ron Rosenbaum

Overview

From the acclaimed author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler comes a stirring manifesto on love in the modern age.

Who wrote the book of love?

In an impassioned polemic, Ron Rosenbaum—who has written books on the mysteries of Hitler’s evil, the magic of Shakespeare’s words, and the terrifying power of thermonuclear explosions—takes on perhaps his greatest challenge: the nature of love. Rosenbaum argues that what we know as love is imperiled now by the quantifiers, the digitizers, and their algorithms, who all seek to reduce love to electrical, chemical, and mathematical formulas.

Rosenbaum brings excitement to his thinking as he interrogates the neuroscience of love, with its “trait constellations,” and the efforts of others to turn all human lovers into numerical configurations. He asks us why our culture has become so obsessed with codifying and quantifying love through algorithms. The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum argues, is being taken over by numerical methods of explanation.

In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the persistence of a mysterious and uncanny phenomenon: the inexorable power of love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385536554
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	225,990
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

RON ROSENBAUM was a Phi Beta Kappa student of literature at Yale, and briefly studied at Yale Graduate School, before leaving to write. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian Magazine, and Slate, among other publications. He was a columnist at the New York Observer and the White House correspondent for the Village Voice during Watergate. His book, Explaining Hitler, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998, has been translated into ten languages. Random House published a collection of his essays and journalism, The Secret Parts of Fortune, in 2000. In 2006, he published The Shakespeare Wars, which Cynthia Ozick called “a spectacular book.” He has been a member of the advisory board of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s publications project, and the editorial board of Lapham's Quarterly.

Editorial Reviews

05/15/2023

Journalist Rosenbaum (Explaining Hitler) contends in this impassioned offering that “love is in trouble” from those who reduce it to a mere scientific or literary object. Defending love as an experiential phenomenon, Rosenbaum criticizes its misrepresentations, including the neuroscientific notion that love can be “mapped” in the brain (“locating these regions tells us nothing about love,” he writes about one such study, “unless they are prepping to do mini-emotional lobotomies”), and the idea that love is a “drive” similar to hunger or thirst. He also devotes a chapter to Leo Tolstoy, who late in his career wrote a trilogy of novellas that betrays a clear disdain of love. In The Kreutzer Sonata, for example, Tolstoy describes carnal love as “shameful” and purports humanity would be better off extinct than engaging in it. But Rosenbaum’s most convincing defense of love comes through earnest renderings of his own relationships and losses (“I can’t deny that for years afterward the memory of the song kept our love alive,” he writes of a past flame. “What will survive of us... sometimes just an old song”). Such recollections powerfully illustrate what is perhaps the work’s most resonant point: “The only thing one can learn while being in love is how little one knows about love.” Even staunch skeptics will have their heartstrings tugged. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Rosenbaum is] a national treasure." —Michele Madigan Somerville

“[I]n this impassioned offering. . .Even staunch skeptics will have their heartstrings tugged.” —Publishers Weekly

“Ron Rosenbaum has done it again. The investigative humanist who dissected unsatisfactory explanations for evil in Explaining Hitler and for genius in The Shakespeare Wars applies his scalpel to reductionist brain-science notions about love with the same lively blend of erudition, insight, and humor that long ago established him as a leading voice in American letters. Share it with someone you love." —Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence

"In Ron Rosenbaum’s insightful, touching and surprising In Defense of Love, Rosenbaum manages to clobber all the theories and rhetoric that attempt to reduce that emotion to science. With Rosenbaum, love has finally met its perfect match." —Betsy Carter, author of Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn

"Ron's work is invariably awe-inspiring. I intend to purchase a copy at full price. The finest compliment you can give an author is not 'I read your book' or 'I loved your book' but 'I bought your book.'" —Teresa Carpenter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing

“Of all the vocabularies that give love its dimensions, neuroscience is not just the most dismal; it’s the shortest on explanatory power. Following the poets—including Sappho, Chekhov, Philip Larkin, John Updike, Sheila Heti, Edith Wharton (especially her porn) and of course Shakespeare—Ron Rosenbaum’s In Defense of Love rescues the ecstatic, agonizing, galactic experience of love from its reduction to fMRI film. Read Rosenbaum and have your heart rent.” —Virginia Heffernan, author of Magic and Loss

"Rosenbaum offers a spirited and enjoyable defense of his version of love." —The Wall Street Journal

"Whether on Hitler's evil, Shakespeare's genius, or the nature of love, Ron Rosenbaum resists the lure of easy answers. . .I love Ron's book." —Errol Morris, Air Mail

From the Publisher

2023-05-13
Probing the mystery of love.

Journalist and critic Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars, among other books, contends that there is a fierce battle going on “for the soul of love.” He argues that it is under threat from a variety of fronts, including “brain-scan neuroscientists and their media popularizers”; “simpering pop philosophers”; “neo-Marxist dialectical materialists,” who see love as transactional; pop psychologists who consider love to be a “drive” rather than an emotion; the pornography industry; and, surprisingly, literary theorists. While scientists try to define love as a quantifiable chemical reaction, literary theorists seek to “historicize” love as an imaginative “construct,” positing that “the language of love is what has actually created love.” Rosenbaum is passionately offended by these efforts and devotes himself to defending love “as an irreducible ontological entity,” far different from the propositions emanating “from pseudoscience and sophistry.” Readers who don’t share his outrage may find his response overwrought. He focuses much ire on Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who has been called the “Queen of Love Science,” whose findings have been widely publicized. Basing her conclusions on fMRI scans, Fisher explains love as chemistry. She has analyzed individuals’ “trait constellations” to conclude that there are “chemical types that determine who you can or should fall in love with.” Rosenbaum finds that conclusion preposterous; love, he asserts, “is not an algorithm.” The author draws on a wide range of sources—including philosophy (Plato, Thomas Nagel), poetry (Sappho, Shakespeare, Larkin, Yeats, Auden), and fiction (Lev and Sofiya Tolstoy, Austen, David Foster Wallace, and Chekhov, among others)—to make the case that love is “evanescent and contingent and unpredictable.” His own history of love bears out that conviction, and part of his motivation for exploring the meaning of love, he reveals, has been finding, finally, the love of his life. “Love,” he is certain, “is a kind of entanglement between two consciousnesses.”

Impassioned but often strained.

Kirkus Reviews