Afbeelding van de auteur.

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (1933–2019)

Auteur van Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey

27 Werken 447 Leden 7 Besprekingen

Over de Auteur

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy served as a consultant during the filming of the motion picture Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson and directed by Bill Condon

Reeksen

Werken van Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy

Kinsey: Public and Private (2004) 29 exemplaren
Jane's Adventures (2006) 16 exemplaren
Cyril Bonhamy and Operation Ping (1985) 12 exemplaren
Cyril Bonhamy v. Madam Big (1981) 11 exemplaren
Love, Sex, Marriage and Divorce (1981) 9 exemplaren
Chameleon (1967) 7 exemplaren
Cyril of the apes (1987) 7 exemplaren

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Leden

Besprekingen

I found this in the book crossing; I have a friend whose daughter likes books about children going into books, so I thought I'd give it a try

It's... odd and not very engaging. It has that Alice in Wonderland feeling of little episodic adventures, where you get to know some curious characters in a strange place, and then move on.

I assumed that the story would be that Jane finds Clarissa, who had fallen into the book and become stuck 200 years ago, and now haunts the castle as a ghost, and rescues her, Instead, Jane finds Clarissa, they have a wonderful week living together on a lily and riding a giant fly, and then Jane realises that she has to leave and go home to her parents and leaves Clarissa with tears in her eyes.

Jane's homelife is as random and strange to the modern reader as her dream life in the Book. She is the child of Lord and Lady Charrington, and lives in a huge rambling castle, completely free to disappear for weeks at a time. She watches her entire home be flooded, and then her father renounces his title (to her mother's sadness) and the book ends with them moving into a council house.

Jane is a nice character though. She is very game, and happy to put herself in all manner of dangerous situations to save her friends or drain the flood. She always goes very well equipped too, with penknife and rope!
… (meer)
½
 
Gemarkeerd
atreic | Nov 3, 2022 |
Despite the auto-generated cover here on GoodReads, this 1971 work of fiction was not the inspiration for the brilliant early-noughties sitcom, or at least Ricky Gervais hasn't acknowledged it as such as far as I'm aware. It's a novel in the form of a screenplay that tries to encapsulate the experience of office life over the course of a day at a generic business in London. Gathorne-Hardy has a decent eye for office eccentrism, with one or two characters standing comparison with Milton in the film Office Space or Keith in Gervais's Office. I especially liked Thumb Man and the woman who spends the day in her filing cabinet. The overwhelming pathos and ennui of the setting are evoked quite well, but Richard B. Wright's The Weekend Man or — the ultimate office novel — Michael Bracewell's Perfect Tense are better in this regard. This is worth a read for anyone interested in the existential condition of the office, especially in Britain in the 60's/70's. It's very slight plot-wise, though, and the screenplay gimmick doesn't really add anything that couldn't have been accomplished in traditional prose, despite the author's justificatory introduction.… (meer)
½
 
Gemarkeerd
yarb | Nov 18, 2020 |
Where are you on the Kinsey scale? As a young woman, on a sleepover, did you ever give your girlfriend eyelash kisses all over her body? As a young boy, did you ever have a Platonic crush on a male friend? If you did, you might rate a 1 on the Kinsey scale which goes from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual). Being a 0 or a 6 makes you somewhat abnormal or as Kinsey would say rare. You see, terms like normal and abnormal are moral terms and not scientific ones. Average and rare are the terms Kinsey would use.

This is a very sympathetic, balanced and humane biography of a man who had a huge effect on our understanding of human sexuality. I enjoyed reading this excellent book not only because it deals with my favorite subject, but also because it is well written.

It seems most of the reactions to Kinsey break out along ideological lines - the negative responses are mainly from conservative monotheists and surprisingly Freudian psychoanalysts because Kinsey thoroughly trashed the evidential basis of much of Freud's understanding of human sexuality.

The author begins where Kinsey's life begins and explores his early childhood and rearing as a conservative bible-believing Methodist up through his death as a 59 year old atheist bisexual researcher of human sexuality who had become the most notorious man in America and probably the world.

Although Kinsey engaged in homosexual sex later in life, the author points out that his one early love 'affair' as a young man was most likely purely Platonic. He pursues his development and mainly focuses on his research for his two main books on male and female sexuality.

I liked how the author continually pointed out the philosophical underpinnings of his thought:

1) Evolution is a fact and should inform all our thinking,

2) Humans are animals and exist on a continuum with other animals,

3) There are no Platonic essences in the natural world. There is no such thing as a homosexual or heterosexual. There are only human animals who engage in homosexual or heterosexual sex acts. There is an infinite variety of animals within each species – hence no essence. No two humans are alike. No two humans like the same kind of sex or amount of sex. As Max Stirner once wrote, ‘The I cannot be generalized.’
Before studying human sexuality, Kinsey made a name for himself from studying Gull Wasps. He measured over a million specimens, cataloging them according to 28 different attributes and found that there were no two alike.

4) Normality and abnormality are purely statistical concepts. 'Normal' should be called average and 'abnormal' such be called rare.

5) Christianity and its sexual mores has done tremendous damage to Westerners.

6) Our sex laws should be reformed to reflect that normality is not a moral norm but a statistical concept.

A balanced biography of a twentieth century pioneer who forever changed our world.
… (meer)
1 stem
Gemarkeerd
PedrBran | 1 andere bespreking | Aug 30, 2014 |
A history of the English public school (what, in the US, we would call a 'private school'), charting the institution and culture of the schools from the 15th century until the 1970s, when the book was written.

What a fascinating book. Very dense - both in content (hundreds of years are covered) and information (most of it was almost entirely new to me.) But it was fascinating. The history of the English public school is one of surprising violence (even as late as the 1950s, corporal punishment not the main method of discipline, it was the ONLY one, and beatings were often carried out by prefects. And then there was the bullying) and passion (many boys had intense crushes on boys in their class, and there were periods of rampant sexual activity, often spurred on by the ridiculous paranoia of the headmasters.)

The author also traces many of the stereotypical 'upper-class' characteristics as well as several ones we think of as stereotypically British, to the 'total societies' the public schools formed, and the particular environment British upper and middle class boys spent the ages of 8 - 18. In fact, the experience was so intense and so formative that many public school boys became Old Boys when they grew up, unable to leave behind their school days, eternally trapped in a kind of agonized nostalgia.

Despite how dense this book was, I really loved the writing style. The author links together evidence from dozens of 'public school genre' novels and autobiographies, as well as correspondence with hundreds of Old Boys from dozens of schools, with a confiding and honest tone.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
shojo_a | 1 andere bespreking | Apr 4, 2013 |

Lijsten

Prijzen

Misschien vindt je deze ook leuk

Gerelateerde auteurs

Quentin Blake Illustrator
Nicholas Hill Illustrator
Neil Stuart Cover designer

Statistieken

Werken
27
Leden
447
Populariteit
#54,865
Waardering
3.9
Besprekingen
7
ISBNs
67
Talen
5

Tabellen & Grafieken