Adventures in the Orgasmatron

1st Edition

How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

Christopher Turner
eISBN-13: 9781429967488

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<p>One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year <br>A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011<br><br> Well before the 1960s, a sexual revolution was under way in America, led by expatriated European thinkers who saw a vast country ripe for liberation. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher Turner tells the revolution's story—an illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression. <br><br> Central to the narrative is the orgone box—a tall, slender construction of wood, metal, and steel wool. A person who sat in the box, it was thought, could elevate his or her "orgastic potential." The box was the invention of Wilhelm Reich, an outrider psychoanalyst who faced a federal ban on the orgone box, an FBI investigation, a fraught encounter with Einstein, and bouts of paranoia. <br><br> In Turner's vivid account, Reich's efforts anticipated those of Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse, and other prominent thinkers—efforts that brought about a transformation of Western views of sexuality in ways even the thinkers themselves could not have imagined.</p>

Sold By Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBNs 142996748X, 9781429967488, 9780374533359, 9780374100940
Language eng
Number of Pages 544
Edition 1st