Christopher Turner
One of ,The Economist,â€™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 revolutionâ€™s storyâ€”an illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression.,Central to the narrative is the orgone boxâ€”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 â€œorgastic potential.â€ 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 Turnerâ€™s vivid account, Reichâ€™s efforts anticipated those of Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse, and other prominent thinkersâ€”efforts that brought about a transformation of Western views of sexuality in ways even the thinkers themselves could not have imagined.
History,Psychology,Sexuality,Nonfiction,Biography,Feminism,Science,Gender and Sexuality,Social Science,Psychology,Psychoanalysis
Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America