Overview

In Masters of Sex, critically acclaimed biographer Thomas Maier offers an unprecedented look at William Masters and Virginia Johnson, their pioneering studies of intimacy, and the sexual revolution they inspired. Masters and Johnson began their secret studies in a small Midwest laboratory, and soon became the nations top experts on sex. Over the course of more than forty years, they analyzed and explained the secrets of orgasm, emotional fulfillment, and sexual dysfunction. But they divorced after twenty years amid a clash of success, betrayal, and jealousies. Weaving interviews with the notoriously private William Masters and the ambitious Virginia Johnson, Maier offers a titillating portrait of the legendary couple. Entertaining, revealing, and beautifully told, this groundbreaking book sheds light on the eternal mysteries of desire and intimacy, and their complicated roles in the American psyche.

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9780465003075

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Reviews

Nelson DeMille, bestselling author of The Gold Coast and The Gate House <br> The subject of this book--sex and love--should interest just about everyone. As a bonus, Thomas Maier is a very fine writer, an accomplished biographer, and an astute reporter. If you read only one biography this year, it should be this first-ever look at the secretive lives of Masters and Johnson. <br> <p><br> Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor's Wife and A Writer's Life <br> A well-written and insightful account of Masters and Johnson, who, in a clinical sense, probably knew more about sex and marital love than any other couple in America

Newsday <\i>writer Maier (The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings<\i>, 2003, etc.) offers a dry look at the research team who unlocked the secrets of America's bedrooms, ushering in the sexual revolution of the late 1960s.The authors of Human Sexual Response<\i>, the incendiary 1966 primer that inaugurated the field of couples sex therapy, William Masters and Virginia Johnson had been research partners since 1956, when Masters, a doctor specializing in fertility and reproductive dysfunction, hired Johnson as an assistant at Washington University. Johnson, a 31-year-old divorcee with two children, was a college graduate from Missouri with little knowledge of medicine but a good deal of aplomb. Masters, ten years her senior and married with two children, had just gotten the green light to explore the uncharted terrain of human sexuality. Warned that he was committing academic suicide, Masters nonetheless delved into the clinical observation of coupling, masturbation, climaxing and performance anxiety. All the while Johnson was at his side, coaching the testing partners, filming, recording data and remaining admirably uncritical. Over ten years the two cemented their research and, discreetly, their amatory partnership. Though they were forced out of the umbrage of the university, they enjoyed remarkable success in their private practice, unseating psychoanalysis as the preferred mode of healing sexual dysfunction. With the publication of their work, they also became famous and rich, though later books on homosexuality and AIDS tarnished their reputations. Maier tries to get at the kernel of this curious and enduring partnership - they finally married in 1971, divorced in 1992 - though Masters in particular remains a hard nut to crack, and the narrative lacks the punch that such a subject should merit.An unsatisfying biography of a bold team whose influence on cultural mores and women's sexual emancipation cannot be underestimated. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Thomas Maier is the author of The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings, which was adapted for Warner Home Video DVD, and the critically acclaimed Dr. Spock, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1999. He is a special writer at Newsday. He lives in Long Island, New York.www.thomasmaierbooks.com

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