Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011 and named an Economist Book of the Year, is a well-researched popular history of Wilhelm Reich and his orgone theory, tracing the Food and Drug Administration's 1954 injunction against orgone accumulators, Reich's 1956 contempt conviction for defying it, and his death in federal prison in 1957. Its strength is that it is a carefully sourced narrative history that has been well received for its research. Its limit is that it is popular rather than peer-reviewed academic history, so a claim resting on Turner's specific interpretive framing of Reich's psychology, rather than the documented legal and biographical facts, should be checked against other Reich scholarship as well.