Item #294149 Everybody: A Book about Freedom. Olivia Laing.

Everybody: A Book about Freedom

Staff pick

W. W. Norton & Company, May 2021. First Edition. Hardcover. New / New. Item #294149
ISBN: 0393608778


The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century--among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.

Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

Some minor bumps and bruises from publisher shipping. This is part of a batch of first printings signed by Laing on a page specially bound in by the publisher

New Book

Price: $26.95

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