In defense of love An argument

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.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.