A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
The Wall Street Journal takes a look at Cristina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love, in which Nehring focuses on certain relationships throughout history to mount a “rousing defense of imprudent ardor and romantic excess.” (“Any of these love stories submitted to a modern-day advice columnist would come back with a diagnosis of troubling pathologies: co-dependent adulterers, a sexually frustrated agoraphobe, a battered wife. Ms. Nehring wants us to see how impoverished this worldview is.”) . . . In the newest issue of n+1’s online book review, Jessica Weisberg makes a case for the work of the late Edgardo Vega Yunqué. Despite reservations about his strident political writing (“it’s like he’s covering himself in bumper-stickers”), Weisberg argues that his lack of concern about what other people thought was a strength: “The ideas that occasion his winks and asides are so personal that they do just the opposite of most self-conscious writing — they make his books more engaging.” . . . In the slim Sum
