is set up as dialogue of letters between two friends, unfolding two (actually three) life stories as if a novel, rather set up like an English epistolary novel.

The childhood friends are the letter authors Dean Hannotte and Ann Agranoff. I know Dean, from my own days of involvement with the Ninth Street Center in the East Village in New York City in the 1970s, as I detail in Chapter 3 of my first "Do Ask, Do Tell" book. Dean, at the time, was the partner of therapist and philosopher , who had developed his theory of human polarities in a series of books and monographs, the best known of which is . I gave a thorough discussion of my own take on this concept in all three of my DADT books.

Ann, starting out with architecture, became an English professor at CUNY, active in meeting climate change, and, with her husband, wrote an iconoclastic book "Ice Palaces" (1983).

Dean's life narrative comes through the letters in the book. The Center continued operating until about 1991 (I last visited it in 1986), but an informal group of people online remains as the Paul Rosenfels Community.

There is an irony in this history of the NSC. Despite its reputation as a place offering "a new way to be gay" back then, and despite Dean's relationship with Paul at the time, Dean is and was largely heterosexual. In fact, Dean says that when the Center opened it was expected that a lot of straight people would come, but in time it came to attract almost exclusively gay men (and not transgender). I was never fully aware of that history. Sometime in the 80s or 90s, he met who had grown up in Communist East Germany (before the Wall fell in 1989). Gradually they would develop a relationship. From 2004-2008, the Rosenfels Community ran a monthly chat on Sunday afternoons that I sometimes participated in. At the time, I can recall Bartlett's saying that the unification of Germany under capitalism had not been a good thing (or I found that on her own blogs). This book reports she had been quite militant in support of communism when younger. I remember meeting young women with this sort of outlook in the early 1970s at the "People's Party of New Jersey".

Dean goes on to relate some of his health problems, and Rachel's support of him, probably extending his life.

But all this sets up the moral tone of the letters. Dean describes himself as a "realist", and skeptical of any philosophies that give automatic answers to questions. He questions whether it is practical for an individual to concern himself or herself with the big issues of the outside world (as I do, and as Ann does too — and it seems that Ann and I have similar views about sustainability of our way of life — we can protect it if we take it seriously and "work smart" — and other know I've taken up the issue of the security of the power grids in a similar way. Ann is skeptical about libertarianism, as she feels it blames the unfortunate their poor station in life — but communism (especially Maoism) was determined to make "almost" everyone share proletarianism.

The letters refer to many other "good books" (Dean attended St. John's College, right abreast of the Naval Academy — in Annapolis MD in youth to become a quiet-life scholar), and many other systems of psychological categorization, especially the Enneagram of Personality. I would probably be a mixture of 3-4-5 on his chart, but I am viewed as a "subjective feminine" (unbalanced personality) in Paul's system of polarities. The letters often refer particularly to the writings of whom I recall from the Center.

Ann, at one point, discusses the connections between polarity, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity — all separate concepts — and offers that transgenderism is increasing in frequency because of pollution, processed foods, and similar concerns. Dean seems to feel that biological gender just doesn't matter all that much anyway — it is character specialization (polarity) that does.

The book constantly prods on moral dilemmas, and brings them down from policy to individual actions. On p. 109 Dean makes a particularly acute observation about a masculine's being "good" and a feminine's being "dutiful" as demanded by external society — noting that duty may become a moral imperative but doesn't add to growth unless accompanied by genuine openness of feel and love in new ways — that is, love people who may seem unappealing to the outside world, even in stressful circumstances, like an infrastructure breakdown.

Dean's last letter, long and intricate, from July 2015, gets into interesting stuff, like the (cosmological) links between mind, brain, and individualized consciousness (amenable to polarity), ending with an odd reference to the evil villain in the film "Hostage" (to be reviewed soon). Other films (and books) get mentioned along the way, like Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" in a discussion of atavism.

On my legacy book reviews blog, I covered number of other books on growth, including Dean's from 2012. In 1990, Dean also published a set of essays , and there is a reference to people who probably tried to use the Center (in the 1970s) for personal cherry-picking. I was "guilty" of that.

[This review can also be found at .]