Everybody

A Book About Freedom

By: Olivia Laing

Narrated by: Elizabeth Sastre

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century - among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.

Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

©2021 Olivia Laing (P)2021 Recorded Books

Superb

An astonishingly good book. Erudite, illuminating, wide in scope and ultimately empowering. Do read it.

Evocative and Thought-Provoking

Not sure how and why I came across this title but it was a listen that met me in the exact right moment.

Olivia Laing's clear-eyed and open-hearted analysis of the work of seminal thinkers and artists and activists, took me places I didn't expect. And in the ship-wrecked wake of 2020/21's storms of tragedy and rage and cruelty and sadness, this listen reminded me of the intractable power of connectedness and genuine humanity. The excellent narration by Elizabeth Sastre served the work beautifully. This is a listen I'll return to when my soul could use a booster shot.

An essential book

For anyone who wants to better understand the different ways in which freedom of the body (and the mind) have been explored by various prominent figures, from Wilhelm Reich to Nina Simone, to the author’s own question of gender. A truly enlightening read, and the narrator of the audio book does a superb job.

Essential and amazing

The narrator is clear and nuanced. The book is so important for these times addressing body politics, repression and racism.

Incredibly Moving

Laing writes like I make art — her proposal seems, on paper, incredibly all over the place, to heterogeneous to hold. But she’s able to make connections between seemingly disparate but — by the end, we’re convinced — equally significant historical figures, at least when it comes to what they offered the world in terms of freedom practice. Sastre’s performance keeps us steadily holding on through a wild ride through form and time. I cannot recommend this book, or this recording, strongly enough.