Alfred C. Kinsey : A Public/Private Life

Rating:
Summary: Great Story, Terrible Book
Review: "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."

Rating:
Summary: Mean Book
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Thorough, biassed and both scientifically and sexually naive
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Mean Book
Review: 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.