Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

One of The Economist’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 revolution’s story — an illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression.

Central to the narrative is the orgone box — 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 “orgastic potential.” 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 Turner’s vivid account, Reich’s efforts anticipated those of Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse, and other prominent thinkers — efforts that brought about a transformation of Western views of sexuality in ways even the thinkers themselves could not have imagined.

• Author
• Christopher Turner

• Format
• hardcover

• Pages
• 544

• Publisher
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 978-0-374-10094-0

• EAN
• 9780374100940

• Genres
• history, psychology, sexuality, biography, feminism, science, psychoanalysis

• Release date
• 2011