"For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary. But Cristina Nehring has a different idea. Her ardent polemic, 'A Vindication of Love,' puts forward a darker, more demanding vision of love. This is not, it should be said right away, a book without ambition: the subtitle is 'Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century,' though it is not exactly romance Nehring is writing about, but a more difficult, vital image of passion she believes we have lost.
.....
Nehring sees in the grandeur of feeling a kind of heroism, even if the relationship doesn't take conventional form or endure in the conventional way. For Nehring, one senses, true failure is to drift comfortably along in a dull relationship, to spend precious years of life in a marriage that is not exciting or satisfying, to live cautiously, responsibly. Is the strength of feeling redeemed in the blaze of passion even if it does not end happily? she asks. Is contentment too soft and modest a goal?"
-Feverish Liaisons, New York Times book review-
