May 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.