Kay Elksong’s Different Values, the title of which speaks to well-worn values rather than more contemporary ones, is a wide-ranging travelogue through the last few bruising years, written as a series of linked reflections on what the pandemic, political fracture, technological acceleration, climate strain, gun violence, and the Israel-Gaza war reveal about the things we’re quietly choosing to prize. It moves from the intimate texture of Covid-era fear and isolation into big public questions about truth, power, and responsibility, repeatedly circling back to one steady claim: that a culture can modernize at warp speed and still be spiritually impoverished if it loses its capacity for empathy, conscience, and love.

What I kept feeling, as I read, was the author’s fierce insistence on tenderness as something practical. In the war chapter, she opens with that oddly perfect pop-culture parable: Sherlock asking a supercomputer, “What is love?” and the machine hungering for “more data” but never reaching the answer. It’s a scene that could’ve been cute or smug in another book, but here it lands like a small, cold bell. Elksong’s best pages do this often, taking a familiar headline-world object and turning it so you suddenly see the bruise underneath. I also appreciated how she lets grief stay grief. When she writes about children being swallowed by America’s gun “new normal,” the statistics aren’t abstracted into policy-speak; they sit there with a kind of terrible weight, especially when she threads Uvalde into the argument as a lived national trauma rather than a talking point.

Elksong writes in an earnest, essayistic voice that leans on quotation, reportage, and moral appeal, and the abundance of references can feel like a floodlight turned on the reader. Sometimes I wanted a little more trust in the image to do the work without being immediately explained. Yet, the book is also acutely aware of our exhaustion with overload. In the mental health sections, she draws on the language of loneliness and the strange seduction of “connection” without commitment, echoing Sherry Turkle’s warning that we keep people “in touch” while holding them at bay. That tension felt honest to me: the book is itself a product of the very era it critiques, an era where we cite and link and stack evidence because we’re terrified no one will listen unless the footnotes come marching in.

When the lens widens to nature’s retaliation and then narrows to Gaza’s “death world,” is where my emotional resistance broke. The volcanic plume rising into the stratosphere and the blunt reminder of forces that dwarf us felt like more than scene-setting; it read like a rebuke to human swagger. And when she quotes doctors and humanitarian officials describing collapsed hospitals and a society made uninhabitable, she isn’t chasing shock. She’s asking what it does to our shared soul when we learn to tolerate that kind of suffering as background noise. The conclusion she presses toward is clear: love, nonviolence, and moral imagination are not naïve luxuries but the only counterforce strong enough to interrupt revenge. I finished the book feeling sobered and strangely steadied, like someone had insisted I look directly at the worst of what we normalize and still believe in our capacity to choose differently. I’d recommend it to readers who want a reflective, faith-inflected, socially engaged meditation on recent American life, especially those who don’t mind a book that thinks out loud, cites heavily, and keeps returning to conscience as the measure of what a culture is becoming.

Pages: 336 | ISBN : 978-0-692-03824-6