Every once in awhile a book comes along that ushers in a massive paradigm shift on a major societal issue. The abolitionist cause was barely struggling along when it got a tsunami of support from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.   The ennui of the suburban housewife and the travails of the inner city working single mother had apparently little in common until the “click” of consciousness engendered by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. And Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring almost single-handedly spawned the environmental movement. The Ascent of Humanity: the Age of Separation, the …

Northfield native and novelist Siri Hustvedt is serious, especially about weighty issues like the nature of personal identity. She’s a serious scholar. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from St. Olaf College, and earned a PhD in English literature from Columbia University.  She’s a serious writer. Primarily known as a novelist—author of The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), and The Enchantment of an American (2006,) among others—she is also a poet and prolific writer of essays. In 2010, she published an autobiographical nonfiction book that delves deeply …