Everybody: A Book About Freedom

"In this multilayered and masterfully structured book, Laing obsessively examines the life of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (a protege of Freud), drawing connections to other intellectuals, ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Malcolm X, while including stories from her own life ..."

"Indeed, she encourages us all to ask new questions to discover how it feels, and what it means, to be free — queries that are as vital as they are resistant to any single answer."

"But it's her ability to describe her own experience of looking at artworks that really illuminates her topics ..."

"She adopts a similar approach – an adeptly braided mix of cultural criticism, biography, and memoir – to explore the body from multiple perspectives, most particularly as a potential locus of freedom in what continues to be a constricted world ..."

"Laing steadily built her reputation as an editor and writer with an earnest sophistication."

"But she is too canny a writer to miss the rich and bitter irony in which efforts to realise this promise so often get caught: every movement to liberate the body comes to be marked in some way by the constrictive regime it's trying to escape ..."