Everybody by Olivia Laing

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to 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 McCarthy-era America, she 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. Everybody is an examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
 
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'A free-wheeling and joyful exploration . . . Laing’s particular gift lies in her unique ability to line up unlikely juxtapositions—of artists, ideas and works—and then draw clear and illuminating insights from such constellations. What her earlier work did for loneliness, this book does for liberation.' - Jack Halberstam, author of Wild Things and Female Masculinity
 
'Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of 20th century Euro-American radical thought . . . Brainy, open-hearted and bold.' - Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse and Let the Record Show