Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

By Christopher Turner

Book Overview

One of The Economist 's 2011 Books of the Year A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 ???? 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. ???? 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. ???? 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374100942
• ISBN13: 9780374100940
• Release Date: June 2011
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.1" x 2.0" x 6.2"