The Affirming Flame

Friedman continues an old and longstanding love: a poetics of dialogue with modern literature. Such a poetics sees literature and its interpretation in terms of what philosopher Martin Buber calls "meeting" or "the between." Friedman's powerful study boldly asserts that meaning can be reached through an engagement with classic works of world literature to arrive at a more powerful and purposeful affirmation while holding the tension with what is negative.

Friedman continues an old and longstanding love: a poetics of dialogue with modern literature. Such a poetics sees literature and its interpretation in terms of what philosopher Martin Buber calls "meeting" or "the between." Friedman's powerful study boldly asserts that meaning can be reached through an engagement with classic works of world literature to arrive at a more powerful and purposeful affirmation while holding the tension with what is negative.

“For more than forty years Roger Cohen has ventured to every corner of the earth to chronicle the great upheavals of our age, but he’s never lost sight of what really matters: love, hope, and all the mysteries of the human heart. Here, in this collection of columns that will take you from the streets of Kyiv to an execution chamber in Alabama, you can read him at his best.”—Dexter Filkins, best-selling author of The Forever War A collection of the finest New York Times columns written by Roger Cohen over more than a decade, accompanied by an original, twenty-thousand-word essay on the state of the world The countless readers who followed Roger Cohen’s column and mourned its end responded above all to what they saw as the marriage in his writing of head and heart. That tenor permeates An Affirming Flame. During his twelve years as a columnist, Cohen aimed to hold power to account at home and abroad, in the name of freedom, decency, pluralism, and the importance of truth and dissent in open societies. He watched with alarm as the outside threat of 9/11 morphed into the internal threat of January 6. This time, the assailants were not jihadi terrorists; they were American white supremacists and seditionists convinced of American decadence but unable to see that they personified it. The threat to American democracy is clear. Cohen dissects this ominous American fracture. He explores themes of displacement, belonging, and his own imperiled craft of journalism. His examination of the rising tide of authoritarian rule takes him to China, and in Kyiv he sees the devastating impact of Vladimir Putin's Russian nationalism. With its trenchant consideration of the plight of refugees, COVID-19, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the war in Afghanistan, Cohen's writing reflects his belief in the unquenchable human quest for dignity. He captures the fight to defend America’s openness, democratic institutions, and ideals against the rising tide of retrogression, division, and assault on truth. This struggle, as Cohen writes, is also the world’s. It is inseparable from the battle to save humanity from the creeping autocracy of the twenty-first century. As he writes, “On lies is tyranny built.”

"In the first part of the book, Jacobs contemplates the work of people whom he takes to be exemplary truth seekers: Rebecca West, W.H. Auden, Albert Camus, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Linda Gregerson, and Leon Kass. He then engages writers who challenge the search for truth: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Iris Murdoch, Wole Soyinka, Philip Pullman, and Anne Carson. The third section of the book consists of a single lengthy essay that pursues the provocative question of whether today's computer technology helps or hinders us in our pursuit of truth."--Jacket.