Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

One of The Economists 2011 Books of the Year A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Well before the 1960s, a sexual revolution was under way in America, led by expatriated European thinkers who saw a vast country ripe for liberation. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher Turner tells the revolutions storyan illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression. Central to the narrative is the orgone boxa tall, slender construction of wood, metal, and steel wool. A person who sat in the box, it was thought, could elevate his or her orgastic potential. The box was the invention of Wilhelm Reich, an outrider psychoanalyst who faced a federal ban on the orgone box, an FBI investigation, a fraught encounter with Einstein, and bouts of paranoia. In Turners vi