In Defense of Love

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

A stirring manifesto on love in the modern age, now available for the first time in paperback: . . .

In a work of ambition and brio, legendary journalist Ron Rosenbaum tackles his hardest topic yet: everyone’s favorite four-letter word. He begins by investigating the neuroscience of love, arguing that our understanding of love is imperiled by quantification and algorithms, which distill our behavior into mathematical formulas, our personality into brain-chemical categories, and our curiosity into quiz questions. The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum posits, is being taken over by numbers.

To save it, he turns to literature and pop culture, discussing writing about love from a vast range of sources, including Tolstoy novellas, trailblazing Updike manuscripts, David Foster Wallace and Chrissie Hynde. Part of love’s essence is its mystery, says Rosenbaum, and when he eventually finds his own answer to the riddle of love -- a happy ending! -- it turns up in a completely unexpected place.

In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the uncanny and the persistent, the sublime and the ridiculous: the inexorable power of love.

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.