Book, Next Woman, A: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness[LS]

Talese delves deep into the intimacy of his contemporaries, paints a fascinating picture of the change in sexual mores that swept the United States in the 1960s and 70s, and reconstructs the tight web of relationships between sex, pornography, religion and censorship in the country. New edition with afterword by Arthur Dapieve. As if it were a novel, this book opens with a scene of male masturbation described in detail, narrates several episodes of adultery and open sexuality and ends with the author naked, on a river beach, defying the greedy gaze of voyeurs. But nothing is fiction. The people's names are real and the scenes and events narrated really happened. In what is one of the most disconcerting pieces of so-called "new journalism", Gay Talese delves deep into the intimacy of his contemporaries and paints a broad and fascinating picture of the changing sexual mores that swept the United States in the 1960s and 70s. Known for going after "impossible" subjects and "forbidden" themes, through his exhaustive research, elegant style and refined historical sense, Talese recomposes the tight web of relations between sex, pornography, religion and censorship in this country founded by puritans, but where sects of free love and nudism have always flourished. Shocking when it was released in 1980, Next Man's Woman is today a classic in the history of sexuality.