Book: Round Up the Usual Subjects

Overview
Robert Brault’s Round Up the Usual Subjects gathers a lifetime’s worth of compact wisdom into a playful, reflective survey of everyday living. The title nods to Casablanca while quietly announcing the book’s intention: to corral the familiar concerns that keep turning up in human life, love and marriage, children and parents, work and worry, time and aging, gratitude and faith, and to examine them with a light, clarifying touch. Rather than building a single narrative, the book assembles a mosaic of brief reflections and aphorisms whose cumulative effect is a philosophy of attention, modesty, and cheerfully earned insight.

Structure and Voice
The book is arranged by theme, with short passages that can be read straight through or dipped into at random. Brault’s voice is wry but never bitter, warm without sentimentality, and concise without feeling clipped. He favors the aphorist’s toolkit, reversal, paradox, and the gentle twist at the end of a line that makes a familiar thought suddenly feel newly minted. The result is a conversation you can pick up and put down, always returning to find a line that fits the day’s mood.

Core Themes
At the center is gratitude for the ordinary. Brault repeatedly turns attention to small moments, a shared joke, a child’s question, a quiet morning, and treats them as the real currency of happiness. Alongside that gratitude runs an awareness of time’s quickening pace; he acknowledges the long days that make up short years and urges readers to cultivate presence over worry. Relationships are treated as a practice more than a state: love is a daily choosing, marriage a shared craft, parenthood a listening act as much as a guiding one. Work appears as both necessity and vocation, meaningful when it serves something beyond status. Faith, in Brault’s pages, is less doctrine than posture, humility, wonder, a willingness to be surprised.

Notable Subjects
Love and marriage: Brault celebrates companionship as an art of noticing, of seeing the person you promised to see, and finds romance in reliability as much as in passion. He is quick to puncture grand declarations with the reminder that kindness does most of love’s heavy lifting.

Family and parenting: Children reveal the adult’s priorities by quietly ignoring them; parents teach best by modeling what they hope to see. The book lingers on the seasonality of family life, tight circles that widen and, if tended, remain connected.

Time and aging: The passing years are a teacher, not a thief. Brault resists nostalgia’s trap by pointing out that we once prayed for the days we now live and that contentment is often a matter of recognition, not acquisition.

Work and worry: Busyness masquerades as importance; usefulness is the better aim. He encourages readers to keep ambition honest by measuring it against service and sanity.

Gratitude and perspective: Happiness is framed as a practice of attention. Change is less something to fear than to navigate with humor and a flexible grip.

Style and Technique
Brault’s signature move is the epigram that turns on a final phrase, creating a small jolt of recognition. He uses homely images, kitchen tables, front porches, school runs, so insight feels grounded rather than lofty. The humor is rueful and humane; even when he chides modern habits, he does so as a fellow traveler, not a scold.

Tone and Appeal
Round Up the Usual Subjects reads like a companionable handbook for living, part keepsake, part pocket mirror. It will especially suit readers who like to pause over a sentence, those who favor wisdom literature, and anyone who wants reminders sturdy enough to meet a hurried day. By gathering the perennial topics and speaking to them with clarity and grace, Brault offers not an argument so much as an invitation: to notice, to value, and to be at home in the small, durable goods of an ordinary life.