Kinsey: Sex The Measure Of All Things

From Publishers Weekly
It seems fitting that the man who started the culture wars over sexuality with the 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male should now be the subject of them. Kinsey's life and career have always been controversial, but the 1997 publication of James H. Jones's Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life intensified the debate and attracted significant media attention by using sensational language to make the claim that the sex researcher was a deeply tormented homosexual masochist whose "inner demons" caused him to distort and falsify his research. While Gathorne-Hardy's new biography by necessity covers much of the same ground, and gives its predecessor fair credit, it also presents itself as a corrective to what its author sees as Jones's deeply ingrained prejudice against his subject and a "strong distaste for homosexuals and homosexuality" as well as nontraditional sexual practices. Methodical and cautious, Gathorne-Hardy lacks Jones's more gripping narrative drive, but he reveals much new important material--such as Kinsey's incredibly productive professional and personal relationship with novelist Glenway Westcott--that illuminates the man and his work. Gathorne-Hardy's study functions best, and most importantly, as a sharp and insightful critique of what he sees as Jones's biases. Tracking what he says are Jones's use of innuendo and pejorative language, his internal contradictions and seemingly purposeful misreadings of interviews, the author not only builds a solid case against the earlier work's conclusions but places them in an increasingly anti-sexual modern cultural context that is reminiscent of the society Kinsey himself fought against 50 years ago. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Comparing the cultural and sociological impact of the pioneering sexual research conducted by Alfred C. Kinsey with the work of Darwin and Freud may be an exaggeration. Nonetheless, in his own lifetime the popular press compared Kinsey's reports to the atom bomb, and his having merited two biographies within three years is a tribute to a dedicated scientist who led a crusade against sexual hypocrisy and whose landmark studies assuredly affected the sexual mores of the 20th century. Both British writer Gathorne-Hardy (whose book was first published in Britain under a different title) and James Jones (Alfred C. Kinsey, LJ 10/15/97) spent more than two decades digging in the archives of the Kinsey Institute, and both books show a dogged commitment to detail. Gathorne-Hardy insists that his is a kinder, gentler interpretation (he criticizes some of Jones's conclusions), but both authors reveal a voyeur's fascination with Kinsey's sex research as well as with his own homosexuality. Serious collections of human sexuality should have both titles.-James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Rachel P. Maines
Gathorne-Hardy's account ... is unabashedly admiring, a sympathetic, insightful and highly readable story.

From Booklist
The debate about Alfred C. Kinsey--the meaning of his personal sexual experimentation and the reliability of his scientific research--continues in this nuanced life from the author of The Interior Castle (1993), a biography of Gerald Brenan, a minor Bloomsbury figure. Gathorne-Hardy's research overlapped with that of James H. Jones in preparing Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (1997); when that book attacked both Kinsey's "demons" and his scientific objectivity, Gathorne-Hardy returned to the U.S. to re-interview a number of his own (and Jones') sources. The result is a biography that views the pathbreaking researcher on sexual behavior with respect but not adoration. To be sure, Kinsey was an eccentric, obsessive, often manipulative man; feelings his colleagues expressed include "loyalty, exasperation, hate, admiration" and fondness. But the researcher's idiosyncrasies did not, finally, "skew" or distort his work, and the questions he asked and the answers he provided have liberated millions from repressive myths. Appropriate for libraries that hold the Jones biography. Mary Carroll


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A moving and humane portrait of one of the last century's great researchers and social reformers. Frank, often witty, but always fair, Gathorne-Hardy presents not just a series of new revelations, but whole new aspects of Kinsey.


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