As a book about who we are and what we owe each other, When I Was a Child I Read Books is more urgently political than any treatise on the shape of entitlement programs or the proper government share of GDP. Caustic as our public debates may be, they mask a convergence on the bigger questions that animate those debates. What Robinson calls “our tendency to create definitions of human nature that are small and closed” can be found virtually anywhere on the American political spectrum today.