Be your best Book

Simply amazing. This is a book by a brilliant Jewish psychologist that fled Nazi Germany before the holocaust, and even converted to Christianity, Roman Catholicism, to be exact.

Anyway, it's a brilliant consideration of gender with some of the best of mid twentieth century psychology, and it's explicitly Christian--and he even quotes C.S. Lewis at the beginning and end of the book.

But it's more than that. It's a full-fledged critique of modernity as "in flight from woman." I normally hate "modernity is evil" narratives, but this one really isn't of the usual low caliber of that genre. Stern is basically critiquing scientism as a kind of over-masculinized hustling or curiosity. He also avoids critiquing society in general, but talks exclusively about the key minds of modernity, namely, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy (post-conversion), and Goethe. All troubled by women in some sense, all trying to put distance between themselves and the feminine, and failing miserably.

Anyway, this is a book I hope to re-read regularly, and I would commend it to someone looking for a good book on gender and on the entire modern world, particularly scientism. Some minor annoyances related to the virgin Mary (but even here he admits the paucity of historical evidence), but those are super easily forgiven.