Everybody, Olivia Laing
Everybody, Olivia Laing
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Everybody
A Book About Freedom

Author: Olivia Laing

Narrator: Elizabeth Sastre

Unabridged: 9 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 05/04/2021


Synopsis

“Astute and consistently surprising critic” (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century.

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.

About Olivia Laing

Winner of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Olivia Laing is the author of three previous books of nonfiction, including The Lonely City, and one novel, Crudo. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She lives in London, England.


Reviews

Goodreads review by julieta

Olivia Laing is becoming one of my favorite essaysts! I have to say this before I write anything about this book, since the pleasure of reading this engaging and wonderful book is the first thing to mention. To speak about bodies and freedom, she speaks of, activism, racism, imprisionment, violence,......more

Goodreads review by Thomas

I appreciated how Olivia Laing frames the body as a source of activism and political resistance in her book Everybody. She writes with intelligence and controlled passion about how forces such as sexism, racism, and homophobia affect our bodies on both an internal and external level. Despite these s......more

Goodreads review by Nada

A book that raised a billion questions in my head, while curating me an entire reading list to look for answers within. Ps. Extremely re-readable. Book review on youtube. ريفيو مصور عن الكتاب على #دودة_كتب [URL not allowed]......more