Followers

Sunday 6 February 2011

THE CENTURY OF SEX



ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-1652-9
Writer: James R. Petersen
Title: The Century of Sex
Subtitle: Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution 1900-1999
Edition: First Edition
Foreword: Hugh M. Hefner
Language: English
Place of Publication: New York
Publisher: Grove Press
Date of Publication: 1999
Format: 190x215mm
Pages: xi+548; index, 527
Illustrations: 121 colour and black and white plates and pictures
Front Jacket Photo: Playboy Archives
Jacket Design by Charles Rue Woods
Binding: Boards in duotone dust jacket
Weight: 1,215gr.
Original Price: USD 35.00
Entry No: 2010011
Entry Date: 17th August 2010



BOOK DESCRIPTION

The Century of Sex
is a comprehensive chronicle of sexual mores, relations, and politics in the twentieth century. James R. Petersen argues that the “Sexual Revolution” began generations before the advent of penicillin, Playboy, and the Pill –and ultimately produced seismic cultural shifts that have changed forever the way Americans live.

Beginning at the turn of the century with the pioneering efforts of Free Love radicals, The Century of Sex chronicles the ensuing struggles of activists for sexual liberation against the agents of repression. Petersen weaves a decade-by-decade narrative packed with colorful characters, a panoply of causes, and unforgettable events. He profiles the activities of censors like Anthony Comstock –head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice –and agencies such as the Legion of Decency and the Moral Majority, and culminates with the prosecutorial inquisitions of Kenneth Star. He introduces heroines such as Ida Craddock, who wrote one of the nation’s first marriage manuals (and paid for the act with her life). Margaret Sanger, who fought with Comstock over birth –and won - and heroes like Alfred Charles Kinsey, whose groundbreaking research changed the way we look at sex.

Throughout the narrative, The Century of Sex explores the ways in which historical tumults of the 1900s affected sex –and vice versa –through  the Jazz Age, the depression, two world wars, the cold war, the sixties, the disco era, and the age of AIDS. The book covers America’s periodic moral panics, from the white-slave hysteria of 1910, to the homosexual panic of the 1950s, to the child-porn scare of the 1980s, and also traces the changes wrought by medical science, social science, and technology, from the vibrator to home video to Viagra.

The Century of Sex is a trenchant chronicle of a turbulent era that proves the truth behind the song lyric from the 1944 movie Pin Up Girl, “Battles are won in the daytime/But history is made at night.”



Wednesday 2 February 2011

THE LOVE DOCTORS



ISBN-13: N/A
Writer: Patrick M. McGrady, Jr.
Title: The Love Doctors
Language: English
Place of Publication: New York, N.Y.
Publisher: The Macmillan Company
Year of Publication: 1972
Format: 160x238mm
Pages: ix+408; Bibliography, 401; Index, 403
Illustrations: Writer's black & white photo on back flap by David Droisen
Binding: Cloth in duotone dust jacket
Weight: 825 gr.
Entry No.: 2011002
Entry Date: 2nd February 2011

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Meet the Love Doctors. Many of their names are household words: Masters and Johnson, Dear Abby, Ann Landers, David Reuben, Albert Ellis, Joyce Brothers. They tell us how to love, when to love –and sometimes even whom to love. They probe and massage our bodies, our minds –our very souls –prescribing a wide variety of cures, all in the cause of giving us what few people ever had enough of: Love.

So who are these Love Doctors whom we endow with so grave and sacred a trust? What do they really know about love or us?

For the answer to these and other questions, join Patrick M. McGrady, Jr. on a guided tour of the Great Love Revolution and of some very special men and women on whom millions rely for hope, prescription , and cure. McGrady has painted full-length portraits of the Love Doctors –complete with their strengths and flaws, their put-ons, let-downs, and hang-ups, their mastery and fumblings. In these pages they discuss themselves, each other, and their views on marriage, sex, adultery, birth control, pornography, and the like.

Listen to Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson as they lash out for the first time at their critics and (with a little help from the author) lay all their cards on the table. Meet Dear Abby, Dear Ann, Dear Rose, and Dear Joyce –and guess whose closet is haunted by “ghosts.” Meet Sten and Inge Hegeler, a handsome Danish couple who specialize “in the manufacture and repair of the ‘Big O.’” And Ménie Grégoire, whose blend of Freudian analysis and Gallic good sense may save France in ways de Gaulle never dreamed of. And Tom and Virginia Palmer, whose blooming Sexual Freedom League portends a swinging new love style that threatens as much as it promises.

You’ll discover love-doctoring techniques that are as different and astonishing as the doctors themselves: from maiden-aunt common sense and garden-variety psychoanalysis to novel laboratory-testing of sexological capacity… demonstration couples… “educational films”… marathon nude encounters… and the oldest and newest modes of sexual intercourse itself.

From the diplomats to the unchartered, from the old-line to the way-out, Pat McGrady presents the gamut of Love Doctors in a critical but sympathetic, lively and witty report on anybody-who-is-anybody in the Great Love Revolution.

THE GOVERNMENT VS. EROTICA




ISBN-13: 978-1-57392-881-X
Writer: Philip D. Harvey
Title: The Government vs. Erotica
Subtitle: The Siege of Adam & Eve
Foreword: Nadine Strossen
Language: English
Place of Publication: Amherst, N.Y.
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Year of Publication: 2001
Format: 153x235mm
Pages: 296 printed on acid-free paper; bibliography, 287; index, 291
Illustrations: 11 black & white pictures, sketches and tables
Front Cover Image: JMS Productions/Artville/Picture Quest
Jacket Design: Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger
Binding: Boards in colour dust jacket
Weight: 630gr.
Entry No.: 2011003
Entry Date: 2nd February 2011

BOOK DESCRIPTION

In 1986, a small mail-order company was invaded by thirty-seven armed law enforcement agents who instantly shut down all operations, herded the employees into a warehouse, and systematically interrogated everyone, allowing them to leave only after subpoenas were distributed. Although this episode may sound like a police action in the former East Germany, it was in fact implemented by the U.S. Department of Justice, then headed by Edwin Meese, against Adam & Eve, a North Carolina business that sells contraceptives, sex toys, and adult videos. Now, the company’s owner, Phil Harvey, offers a firsthand account of this David-and-Goliath battle, The Government vs. Erotica goes to the heart of our national debate over First Amendment freedom of expression versus government attempts to limit the availability of erotic materials.

Harvey’s personal memoir of an eight-year struggle –eventually victorious –against  the strong-arm tactics of the Justice Department raises important questions about federal abuse of power, the slow erosion of First Amendment rights through government intimidation, the effects of pornography, the archaic laws that attempt to regulate sexuality between consenting adults, the class-war implications of this battle, and the relationship between sex and religion.

The Government vs. Erotica provides a detailed account of the inner workings of the legal process and of the feisty owners and managers of a small company determined to stand up for their rights. This controlled, yet suspenseful and humorous story is a wake-up call for all who would be complacent about their First Amendment rights.