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Everybody: A Book About Freedom
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About This Book
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 Joseph McCarthy's 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. 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.
Reviews
"Line by line and thought by thought, Laing writes with surgical discipline; if that precision is lacking on the level of her highest-order argument, the sense of unfinished business that lingers is its own pleasure ..."
"And this tension, between defiant hope and sober realism, only enriches her intensely moving, vital and artful book."
"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."
"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 ..."
"Reading Everybody, it's impossible to turn away from all the pain that has been inflicted on bodies ..."
"The author dedicates the book to 'bodies in peril,' from individuals impacted by the European migrant crisis of 2015, to everyone impacted by COVID-19."
"Everybody is a galvanizing book during a time of incredible hesitation."
"The formula works for her ..."
"But with so many ends to tie, Laing oversimplifies, relying on tongue-in-cheek turns of phrase that are ill suited to the gravity of her subjects ..."
"Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring."
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