Kinsey

A Biography

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:24th Feb '05

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Kinsey cover

The incredible life of one of the most fascinating scientists whose investigations into human sexuality ignited the sexual revolution.

Alfred Kinsey was the twentieth century's first scientifically reputable and most influential researcher into sex.

For this remarkable biography - which forms the basis of a major film - Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has interviewed in depth Kinsey's remaining family, his close colleagues, friends and lovers.

Alfred Kinsey was the twentieth century's first scientifically reputable and most influential researcher into sex. His Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (The Kinsey Report), published in 1948, was an explosive bestseller, followed in 1953 by his even more radical statistics on female sexuality - both based on over 18,000 case histories. But Kinsey's exploration went much further than that. Bisexual, he experimented with many of the behaviours he was hearing about; and his wife and close colleagues experimented as well.

For this remarkable biography - which forms the basis of a major film - Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has interviewed in depth Kinsey's remaining family, his close colleagues, friends and lovers. With wit and subtlety he reveals whole new aspects of this complex, heroic, obsessive and ultimately sympathetic man.

Meticulous and energetic, critical where necessary, never coy, with some brilliant swerves of presentation and a delicious line in low-key humour. Sex, of course, is endlessly gripping but Gathorne-Hardy gives a sense of lifting the subject out of the mean and shabby into a wonderful, humane light, paralleling precisely what Kinsey himself did -- Duncan Fallowell * Daily Express *
An excellent, far from adulatory biography * New Statesman *
An affecting portrait...Gathorne-Hardy's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious... An excellently researched book * Literary Review *
A deeply humane book... This biography's vivid protrait of a genius possessed is so compelling... Kinsey is one of the most fascinating and influential figures of the twentieth century, a flawed visionary whose brave and amusing experiences are a testament to the rich complexity of human sexuality... With grace and wit Gathorne-Hardy has given us the full measure of the man -- Michael Shelden * Daily Telegraph *
At exactly the right moment, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has produced a serious study of Kinsey, of the man and the work... This is the book we need to cap Kinsey's work of liberation at his century's end -- Gore Vidal

ISBN: 9781844138364

Dimensions: 197mm x 129mm x 33mm

Weight: 441g

528 pages