Everybody A Book About Freedom Olivia Laing by Olivia Laing 9781509857128, 1509857125 instant download after payment.

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

"Revelatory... Dreaming beyond conventional wisdom and restrictive visions, Laing emboldens us to seek liberation across differences in the face of turmoil. Everybody is a galvanizing book during a time of incredible hesitation."  -  Lauren LeBlanc, Boston Globe

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 travelling 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.

"With [Wilhelm] Reich as a touchstone, Laing investigates many artists and writers with particularly vexed connections to their bodies... Laing reveals in visceral detail society’s terror “of different kinds of bodies mixing too freely” and envisions a future in which that terror no longer exists. Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring."  -  Kirkus Reviews

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 imperilled, 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.