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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Clear-Eyed Challenge to Deadening Cultural Trends, June 28, 2009
This review is from: A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
Nehring's sweeping study of the amorous drives of men and women from classical antiquity through the present is a delight on many levels. She writes with the wit and grace of the journalistic pundit she is, but her scholarship is thoroughgoing and illuminating--especially about texts educated readers too easily assume they know all there is to know about. Nehring has surprising yet supportable things to say about Plato's amorous dialogues, Dante's Vita Nova, Trstan and Iseult, and the emergent courtly tradition. She delves deeply into creative lives, especially women's, to underscore what is unavoidably a radical and challenging thesis: that passionate--even seemingly crazy passionate--love far from blinds lovers; it lights their way as no other condition can. In Nehring's view, Love, acknowledged for what it is, is the way out of the deadening cultural malaise created by love-averse pundits on both right and left. This is a no-category treasure of a book.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All for Love, August 19, 2009
This review is from: A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
All for Love
This wonderfully learned, wonderfully exuberant defense of love looks simultaneously at how we live in the contemporary world and how great lovers have behaved in the past. Sadly, for all our freedom of choice and opportunity, we moderns finish a distant second (or fourth, or fifth) place. Taking on the received wisdom of the decades following the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 60s, Nehring draws from her deep reading of the classics to argue for the qualities usually seen as threats to a desirable relationship: inequality, transgression, long distance, aggression, among others. Although all this stuff mother warned you about can easily turn a couple into wrecks like Sid and Nancy rather than the idealized lovers Nehring lingers on, we forget at our peril how human nature craves risk and obstacle to confront and overcome.
In its humanity and range of reference--Nehring is equally at home among the writers of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern periods--this book reminds me of Ocavio Paz's splendid The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, on the same subject. But where Paz's book reflects on love after a long lifetime of experience, Nehring's plunges in with the spirit of youth and an appetite for more life, more experience. Although one does occasionally wish for a more vigilant editor--figures such as "the famous French novelist of the nineteenth century, Stendhal" and "the Greek philosopher, Plato" stumble into the book before finding surer footing in Nehring's larger arguments--the author's deep, personal engagement with her material makes this volume a compelling read.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love in the time of choler, July 16, 2009
This review is from: A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
Cristina Nehring navigates the rocky shoals between angry feminists and men honeslly confused by their movement to assert that we need a new time of "revived romantic hope...of fresh daring" between people who long for joy that love once seemed to promise to couples. She plumbs literature and literary biography to explore how love brought pain, joy, sorrow, and sublime engagement with life to her subjects, most of whom are from Western culture and the early modern world.
Her project is nothing less than to reinvent romantic love for the early 21st century, when we are often diverted by gender and power issues and a sense of triumphalism that sees marriage as the ultimate and only measure of success. (Not for a moment does she discount that wondrous outcome for many, however.)
It appears that Nehring's wellspring for her study may have come from her insight that "the more intelligent [women] are, the more ironical and distant [they] must be" to love's calling, its demands, its challenges. Au contraire, insists this American writer living in Paris: intelligent women are "excited by men."
For some of us, her chapter on "Love As Failure" may offer deep consolation over lives where love did not "succeed." She draws on the stories of Heloise and Abelard, Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther," and Ralph Waldo Emerson's love for Margaret Fuller. Each had its "brush with the sublime," she insists. Each partook of the "heroic and transcendent" nature of love, which we have lost and which she wants to "make honorable" again.
If you believe, or once did, that love held out a hope worthy of life itself, this book vindicates your belief. Argue against that proposition, if you will--but enjoy an inspiring argument, based in rich scholarship, and
presented in prose that doesn't miss a beat or a line.
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