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Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life
by James H. Jones
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Diane Pub Co (1997-03-01)
ISBN: 0756775507
EAN: 9780756775506
Dewy Decimal #: 155
Hardcover: 937 pages
SKU: 25180
Condition: Collectable Like New
Comments: THE HARDBACK BOOK! NORTON, 1997. THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION. WITH GREAT PHOTOGRAPHS! HARDCOVER BOOK W/GILT LETTERING, DUST JACKET and pages are IN MINT CONDITION, CLEAN AND TIGHT. LOOKS BRAND NEW! Ships immediately w/FREE tracking, GREAT PACKAGING. To Overseas, will be shipped by AIR MAIL.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
In this brilliant biography of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, Jones unlocks the long-closed archives of the Kinsey Institute to present a moving & even shocking portrait of the man who pierced the veil of reticence surrounding human sexuality. Here is an incisive portrait that truly separates the myth from the man. Shows that the public image of disinterested biologist cultivated by Kinsey was a carefully crafted public persona. The Kinsey who emerges here was a social reformer who devoted his every waking hour to the destruction of sexual repression. Kinsey's life is much more than the story of a scientist who sparked the cultural debate of our century. His odyssey illustrates in microcosm the transition from Victorian to modern times. Photos.
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Amazon.com Review
This astonishing biography of Alfred Kinsey, the man who launched the sexual revolution, is graphically frank about his decidedly out-of-the-mainstream sexual practices (including masochism and voyeurism), yet historian James Jones doesn't exploit the material for titillation. Instead, Jones argues compassionately and persuasively that Kinsey's personal sexual demons sparked his campaign to demolish Victorian taboos about sex by gathering the scientific data eventually published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Jones reveals that the data were hardly as unbiased as Kinsey claimed, but it was world-shaking nonetheless. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life is a magnificent work of cultural history as well as a sensitive study of a troubled individual.
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Customer Reviews
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Mean Book
Rating  (2)
Date: 2004-05-14
17 out of 32 customers found this reveiw helpful
Jones certainly did his homework, but the work comes across as mean, even vindictive. He shows Kinsey is the harshest light and he comes across as excessively judgmental. A more recent book, Sex - the Measure of All Things by Jonathan Gathorne Hardy is a kindler and more balanced look at Kinsey and his work. I recommend starting with that. Kinsey was a great pioneer -- not perfect -- but a true giant in opening up to the doors to our sexuality. The Christian right has spent the last thirty years trying to discredit Kinsey's work and take us back to the 19th Century.
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Great Story, Terrible Book
Rating (2)
Date: 1999-10-24
10 out of 32 customers found this reveiw helpful
"Awkward" and "provincial" wrote the NY Times reviewer, and I can't disagree. To get an idea of the biographer's perspective on Kinsey, consider that he refers to an interest in S/M as "peculiar," and closes by predicting that had the atheistic Kinsey lived to see the age of AIDS, he would have seen AIDS as the work of a "wrathful God."
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Thorough, biassed and both scientifically and sexually naive
Rating (2)
Date: 1999-05-20
19 out of 33 customers found this reveiw helpful
James Jones's biography of Alfred c Kinsey is a valuable antidote to the hagiographies and demonologies published so far. Jones presents the nastier sides of his subject's personality and exposes his strategically concealed sexual practices. However, Jones presents Kinsey as a pervert and charlatan, failing to understand the moral and scientific rationales for Kinsey's approach to sex research and thus totally misrepresents both the man and his achievement. Jones's last-page sop to Kinsey's greatness seems to be a cowardly after-thought to a bilious, splenetic and angry book.
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A better choice
Rating (2)
Date: 1998-09-17
29 out of 76 customers found this reveiw helpful
I would recomend reading Judith Reismman's new book: Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences.The Kinsey Institute revealed that Kinsey used pedophiles to document orgasms in hundreds of boys and girls as young a 5 months old. One of his favorites reported abusing at least 800 children. These Kinsey reclassified prostitutes as married woman when he could not find enough woman willing to submit to his questionnaire. He used child molesters, rapists, homosexuals, prostitutes,sadists, masochists, etc. to represent the average American. Kinsey would not allow anyone, even a janitor to work for him unless they submitted to a sexual history questionnaire. When applicants did not agree that adultery, pre-marital sex, and sex with animals was normal, he told them they would not fit in with his staff. The Rockafeller Foundation's records reveal that Kinsey's associates were unqualified. Not only were the histories unscientifically administered but the statistics were proven unreliable and inacurate. If you want to know the full truth of the Kinsey deception -- buy Reisman's well documented book.
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highly readable biography of a complex individual
Rating  (5)
Date: 1998-04-11
13 out of 15 customers found this reveiw helpful
i had not known too much about kinsey until i read this book . . . now i know perhaps even more than i watnted to know (the book is nearly 1,000 pages). . . however, it was never dull . . . and would be of interest to readers interested in books about higher education, the mdeia, public rleations, statistics, politics, and yes, sex also! . . . i recommend the book!
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