Here are 100 books that Love for Sale fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I finished my second book, which followed the life course of women in the U.S. in the early 20th century, I was left with questions and some confusion about women’s sexuality in the period. Books and magazine articles at the time obsessively discussed young women and their sexual freedom. But young women’s journals, and the psychological literature showed that publicly, young women performed a heterosexual script, but privately, and emotionally, they often remained far more comfortable with other girls and young women. Slowly it became clear that the real sexual revolution of the 20th century was the triumph of heterosexual relations and norms during the 1920s until the 1940s.
While we can hardly think about couples today without the idea of dating, the practice was new and very edgy in the early 20th century.
Beth Bailey shows how the classic “dating and rating” complex emerged and became not just accepted but expected among middle-class couples. She also takes us through the transition to the “going steady” complex later in the century.
"Whether or not we've come a long way since then, this engaging study of courtship shows that at least half the fun is in reading about getting there."--'St. Louis Post-Dispatch.'
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
When I finished my second book, which followed the life course of women in the U.S. in the early 20th century, I was left with questions and some confusion about women’s sexuality in the period. Books and magazine articles at the time obsessively discussed young women and their sexual freedom. But young women’s journals, and the psychological literature showed that publicly, young women performed a heterosexual script, but privately, and emotionally, they often remained far more comfortable with other girls and young women. Slowly it became clear that the real sexual revolution of the 20th century was the triumph of heterosexual relations and norms during the 1920s until the 1940s.
This is a tour de force on the lives of girls and young women in the era of World War II and the 1950s.
Littauer makes use of non-traditional sources to show how young women negotiated a sexual landscape that was rapidly changing and which gave them more choices and often more control over their sexuality.
During the war years, young women found that the rapid mobilization and unsettled conditions near military bases gave them opportunities for sexual adventures that settle times would never allow.
And during the post-war, within the “going steady” practices of the time, women could become sexually active with some protection from social stigma.
In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II-era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms.
When I finished my second book, which followed the life course of women in the U.S. in the early 20th century, I was left with questions and some confusion about women’s sexuality in the period. Books and magazine articles at the time obsessively discussed young women and their sexual freedom. But young women’s journals, and the psychological literature showed that publicly, young women performed a heterosexual script, but privately, and emotionally, they often remained far more comfortable with other girls and young women. Slowly it became clear that the real sexual revolution of the 20th century was the triumph of heterosexual relations and norms during the 1920s until the 1940s.
Michael Moffatt was a professor of anthropology when he embedded himself in the Rutgers student dorms to begin a years-long investigation of what entering adulthood meant for undergraduates at the State University of New Jersey.
Moffatt’s research included survey data, perceptive description of his own experience, and student journals (used with permission, of course). In the great tradition of social science, Moffatt identifies a range of sexual types among the young people he studied.
Coming of Age is about college as students really know it and-often-love it. To write this remarkable account, Michael Moffatt did what anthropologists usually do in more distant cultures: he lived among the natives. His findings are sometimes disturbing, potentially controversial, but somehow very believable. Coming of Age is a vivid slice of life of what Moffatt saw and heard in the dorms of a typical state university, Rutgers, in the 1980s. It is full of student voices: naive and worldy-wise, vulgar and polite, cynical, humorous, and sometimes even idealistic. But it is also about American culture more generally: individualism,…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
In 2011, I was a newly minted college professor who was trying to support my students’ interests (Greek life) in hopes that they would return the favor and support mine (medieval literature). Never in a million years would I have guessed that accepting an invitation to attend a Greek event on campus would snowball into receiving a bid to join a National Panhellenic Conference sorority and serve as its faculty advisor. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my perspective uniquely positioned me to shed new light on the longstanding controversies plaguing these organizations and provide a new lens through which to view their impact not only on campus culture but society at large.
I’ve long had a professional crush on sociologist Lisa Wade as her work is a deadly combination of brilliant and compulsively readable.
Her study was published while I was writing my book and serves as a companion piece to understanding how hookup culture operates on American college campuses. As de facto speakeasies, fraternity houses serve as the campus party and, by extension, hookup headquarters.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not always a good thing either.
The hookup is now part of college life. Yet the drunken encounter we always hear about tells only a fraction of the story. Lisa Wade offers the definitive account of this new sexual culture and demonstrates that the truth is both more heartening and disturbing than we thought. Offering invaluable insights for parents, educators and students, Wade situates hookup culture within the history of sexuality, the evolution of higher education and the unfinished feminist revolution. Using new research, she maps out a challenging emotional landscape marked by unequal pleasures, competition for status and sexual violence. Accessible and open-minded, compassionate and…
People sometimes say that the purpose of anthropology is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I think the same about history. As these books demonstrate, apparently normal early Americans have complex and unique inner lives, while those who seem bizarre, remote, or august, in fact, have wholly relatable human experiences. I usually write about complicated systems, like insurance and law. But I cherish these books about outcasts, oddballs, and one-of-a-kinds. They remind me that our society comprises individuals whose life experiences, worldviews, and decisions are unique—and ultimately unpredictable. Whenever I write, I try to remember that.
New York in the 1830s was a modern city on the make, where you could find Irish immigrant neighborhoods, white-collar workers, fire insurance, social reformers...and the bizarre religious cult of the Prophet Matthias.
I find Matthias reactionary and creepy, but I am fascinated by how he sees modern life through a dark mirror. His loathing of the rising middle-class world was so specific! He hated new-fangled cast-iron stoves, "women who do not keep at home," and "men who wear spectacles." Johnson and Wilentz refuse to spell out all the lessons of this book; instead, they dump you into a strange environment where the most unsettling moments are actually the ones when something suddenly feels familiar.
Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz brilliantly recapture the forgotten story of Matthias the Prophet, imbuing their richly researched account with the dramatic force of a novel. In the hands of Johnson and Wilentz, the strange tale of Matthias opens a fascinating window into the turbulent movements of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening--movements that swept up great numbers of evangelical Americans and gave rise to new sects like the Mormons. Into this teeming environment walked a down-and-out carpenter named Robert Matthews, who announced himself as Matthias, prophet of the God of the Jews. His hypnotic personality drew…
I’ve always been fascinated by how we remember the past and why some things get written into histories and other things don’t. I realized that Nothing happens all the time but no one has thought to ask how we remember it. Once I started looking for how Nothing was being remembered, I found it all around me. Books I read as a kid, movies I’d seen, songs I’d heard – these were my sources. So when I started working, Nothing got done (yes, I love puns!).
I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.
But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.
The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Over my twenty years as a historian, the common thread in my work is the gap between how people are supposedto behave and how they actually do behave. From interracial sexual relationships in the segregated South, to rum smuggling from Cuba during Prohibition, to abortion on college campuses before Roe, I'm interested in how people work around rules they don’t like. And rules about sex are some of the most ignored rules of all. Reading about strange beliefs and common desires connect us to our ancestors. Being a professor of history at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama allows me to research bad behavior in the past to my heart’s content.
It is all very well and good to talk about the sexual revolution in places like New York City or San Francisco. But what did it look like in places like Kansas? This book tells you. It might surprise you that for college students the sexual revolution started with dorm rules in the 1950s. Or that concerns about overpopulation fueled distribution of the Pill. And that women’s liberation was a big deal even in fly-over country. Ultimately, this book makes clear that the changes that we connect with the Sexual Revolution happened in every corner of the United States.
This is the story of the sexual revolution in a small university town in the quintessential heartland state of Kansas. Bypassing the oft-told tales of radicals and revolutionaries on either coast, Beth Bailey argues that the revolution was forged in towns and cities alike, as "ordinary" people struggled over the boundaries of public and private sexual behaviour in postwar America. The author challenges contemporary perceptions of the revolution as simply a triumph of free love and gay lib. Rather, she explores the long-term and mainstream changes in American society, beginning in the economic and social dislocations of World War II…
I’m interested in everything – which is a problem, because there’s not time for everything. So how do you find the best of the world and your own place in it? Understanding your motivations is a good place to start, hence The Molecule of More. The rest comes from exploring as much as you can, and that begins with understanding the scope of what’s out there: ideas, attitudes, and cultures. The greatest joy in my life comes from the jaw-dropping realization that the world is so full of potential and wonder. These books are a guide to some of the best of it, and some of the breadth of it.
Every generation believes that they see further and think deeper – and weirder – than every one that came before. From this perspective, we imagine that we can do everything differently that those who preceded us. In this book, one of the creators of the so-called New Journalism shows just how wrong we are. In particular, Talese provides a tour of the history of sexual mores, how cultures reflect those mores, and how tradition turns out to be a more powerful cultural magnet than we expect. We can try to make our own new ways in a lot of areas, but the biological pull we all experience invariably pulls us back to a few tendencies and trends we will likely never shake as a species.
An intimate personal odyssey across America's changing sexual landscape
When first published, Gay Talese's 1981 groundbreaking work, Thy Neighbor's Wife, shocked a nation with its powerful, eye-opening revelations about the sexual activities and proclivities of the American public in the era before AIDS. A marvel of journalistic courage and craft, the book opened a window into a new world built on a new moral foundation, carrying the reader on a remarkable journey from the Playboy Mansion to the Supreme Court, to the backyards and bedrooms of suburbia—through the development of the porn industry, the…
I am an anthropologist who has written or edited more than a dozen books on topics that range from the lives of trans sex workers, to the anthropology of fat. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and Scandinavia. I work at Uppsala University in Sweden, where I am a Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology, and where I direct a research program titled Engaging Vulnerability.
This is the Granddaddy of earthshattering, perspective-changing books: philosopher Michel Foucault’s nimble dissection of the rise and the role of sexuality in the Western world. Written, and surely meant to be read, more like a Homeric epic poem than an academic treatise, every single sentence in this book quivers with energy and perception. From pithy aphorisms like “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”, to heady pronouncements such as ‘”Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective”, this book is a gift that perpetually keeps on giving. Guaranteed to blow your mind.
Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century.
Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I am peculiar. Really. I’m an autistic, non-binary, PhD historian who writes mystery novels (The Framed Women of Ardemore House, The Dead Come to Stay) and weird non-fiction books (Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher and The Intermediaries). But I also love to read, and among my friends are folks like Deanna Wraybourn (Killers of a Certain Age) and Chuck Wendig (Staircase in the Woods), Mary Roach (Stiff) and Deborah Blum (Poisoner’s Handbook). I wanted to share their work, too. That’s why I started the Peculiar Book Club YouTube and podcast: to be a home for authors and readers of the quirky, quizzical, curious, and bizarre. If you’re weird, you’re family.
Why are there so many sex books on my peculiar list? Because sex is one of those subjects we often ignore or treat as taboo—despite it being around since, well, according to Feltman, a particularly amorous pre-historic ameba-like critter. This book also appeals to me because, as a gender-fluid person, I love the idea that the evolutionary status quo used to be essentially pansexual, with exploded gender categories (basically, that ameba was going to try its luck with anything it came across). Along the way, this book stomps on myths and instead shares true facts, which are often much weirder. You will love it.
A rollicking, myth-busting history of sex that moves from historical attempts at birth control to Hildegard von Bingen’s treatise on the female orgasm, demystifying plenty of urban legends along the way.
Roman physicians told female patients they should sneeze out as much semen as possible after intercourse to avoid pregnancy. Historical treatments for erectile dysfunction included goat testicle transplants. In this kaleidoscopic compendium of centuries-old erotica, science writer Rachel Feltman shows how much sex has changed—and how much it hasn’t. With unstoppable curiosity, she debunks myths, breaks down stigma, and uses the long, outlandish history of sex to dissect present-day…
