Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics By Leon R. Kass Encounter Books, 313 pages, $26.95

Leon R. Kass's Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity is hardly a novel or a book of the sort nowadays called "literary nonfiction." Quite the opposite: it is a demanding philosophical discourse addressing a series of complex ethical and biomedical issues. And yet, as with virtually all of Kass's previous writing, we begin to miss the reassuring rhythms of his guiding voice as soon as we've read the last sentence. For Kass illuminates the human condition, fostering reverence for the multifarious aspects of our shared humanity by viewing the most technological of bioethical concerns through the lenses of the morality, love and creativity that characterize our species at its best.

Sherwin B. Nuland's Lost in America will be published in January. He is a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University and the author of How We Die. Leon R. Kass is the Hertog Fellow at AEI.