Kinsey

Kinsey

A Biography

Summary

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.

Reviews

  • 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

About the author

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy

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