Everybody: A Book About Freedom

"The formula works for her ..."

"Reflecting on her fraught sense of embodiment, Laing creates a penetrating examination of the political and cultural meanings ascribed to bodies as well as the relationships of bodies to power and freedom ..."

"Intrepid cultural critic Laing (The Lonely City, 2016) conducts incisive inquiries into complex subjects by assembling a galaxy of innovators with whom to commune."

"Yet Laing's Reichian utopianism, with its ultimate horizon of a body without fear, coexists with a clear-eyed sense, at work in all its granular explorations of sexual politics, art and ideas, of how and why that horizon seems always to be vanishing."

"Novelist and critic Laing (Crudo) places the life and legacy of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) at the center of this impassioned and provocative study ..."

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

"Everybody concentrates with exuberance on bodies as a means to riddle out the expression and performance of freedom."

"Deftly grappling with Reich's failures alongside his 'obviously more fertile ideas', Laing charts the impact of his ideas on her own life and values, and finds a line connecting the revolutionary impulse of Reich to the emancipatory movements of feminism, gay liberation and US civil rights that shaped the second half of the 20th century."

"She writes about the sick body, imprisoned bodies, bodies that protest, the sexual body, bodies that have experienced acts of violence—illuminating the strengths and the weaknesses of the corporeal form ..."

"That she has no final answer to the problem of freedom does not detract from her achievement."