?Simply one of our most exciting writers' Observer ?A free-wheeling and joyful exploration of
the works and lives of a range of artists and thinkers who brought libidinal and creative
energy together with spectacular results' Jack Halberstam 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. ?A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions
about life and art' Telegraph
