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The Birth of the Pill

How Four Pioneers Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

Jonathan Eig

$50.95   $43.33

Paperback

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English
Pan Books
09 February 2016
"""Riveting ... written with pace and clarity, The Birth of the Pill is a vivid portrait of four brilliant and courageous misfits."" Daily Telegraph

In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then seventy-one, and who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, arrived at a Park Avenue apartment building. She had come to meet a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation more than twenty years her junior. His name was Gregory Pincus.

In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, and then funded by the wealthy widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic and, crucially, Catholic doctor from Boston, who battled his own church in the effort to win public approval for the controversial new drug, he succeeded. Together, these four determined men and women changed the world.

Spanning the years from Sanger's heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminism, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and vividly written, The Birth of the Pill is a gripping account of a remarkable cultural, social and scientific journey.

PRAISE FOR THE BIRTH OF THE PILL

""Brilliant ... reads like a thriller ... For all the criticisms levelled at it in later years, the Pill's philosophical impact has been as significant as its physical effect. Its advocates deserve this vivid and life-affirming history."" Observer

""Rousing and involving ... a reminder of just how hard-fought, cobbled-together and compromise-ridden are the histories of some of the social structures we take for granted."" Independent"

By:  
Imprint:   Pan Books
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Edition:   Unabridged edition
Dimensions:   Height: 203mm,  Width: 127mm,  Spine: 23mm
Weight:   435g
ISBN:   9781447234814
ISBN 10:   1447234812
Pages:   400
Publication Date:  
Recommended Age:   From 18 years
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Chapter - 1: A Winter Night Chapter - 2: A Short History of Sex Chapter - 3: Spontaneous Ovulations Chapter - 4: A Go-To-Hell Look Chapter - 5: Lover and Fighter Chapter - 6: Rabbit Tests Chapter - 7: 'I'm A Sexologist' Chapter - 8: The Socialite and the Sex Maniac Chapter - 9: A Shotgun Question Chapter - 10: Rock's Rebound Chapter - 11: What Makes a Rooster Crow? Chapter - 12: A Test in Disguise Chapter - 12: Cabeza de Negro Chapter - 14: The Road to Shrewsbury Chapter - 15: 'Weary and Depressed' Chapter - 16: The Trouble with Women Chapter - 17: A San Juan Weekend Chapter - 18: The Women of the Asylum Chapter - 19: John Rock's Hard Place Chapter - 20: As Easy as Aspirin Chapter - 21: A Deadline to Meet Chapter - 22: 'The Miracle Tablet Maybe' Chapter - 23: Hope to the Hopeless Chapter - 24: Trials Chapter - 25: 'Papa Pincus's Pink Pills for Planned Parenthood' Chapter - 26: Jack Searle's Big Bet Chapter - 27: The Birth of the Pill Chapter - 28: 'Believed to Have Magical Powers' Chapter - 29: The Double Effect Chapter - 30: La Senora de las Pastillas Chapter - 31: An Unlikely Pitch Man Chapter - 32: 'A Whole New Bag of Beans' Chapter - 33: The Climax Section - i: Epilogue Acknowledgements - ii: Acknowledgements Section - iii: Notes Section - iv: Selected Bibliography Index - v: Index

Jonathan Eig, a former senior special reporter at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of three highly acclaimed books, two of which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (Simon & Schuster, 2005), won the Casey Award for best baseball book of 2005; his second book, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season (Simon & Schuster, 2007), was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated, and The Washington Post. In his third book, Get Capone (Simon & Schuster, 2010), Eig discovered thousands of pages of new material on Capone, affirming his trustworthy reporting reputation in what The New York Times called a multifaceted portrait, a gore-spattered thriller, and as much a dark history of urban America between the world wars as it is another mobster's life story. And in The Birth of the Pill, Eig again tackles an enormous volume of unexamined personal correspondence in this original and richly-textured narrative.

Reviews for The Birth of the Pill: How Four Pioneers Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

Brilliant ... reads like a thriller ... For all the criticisms levelled at it in later years, the Pill's philosophical impact has been as significant as its physical effect. Its advocates deserve this vivid and life-affirming history. -- Joan Smith * Observer * Riveting ... written with pace and clarity, The Birth of the Pill is a vivid portrait of four brilliant and courageous misfits. -- Frances Wilson * Daily Telegraph * Rousing and involving ... a reminder of just how hard-fought, cobbled-together and compromise-ridden are the histories of some of the social structures we take for granted. * Independent on Sunday * Jonathan Eig's vivid book is a rebuke to all those who lambast the Pill for unleashing promiscuity, family break-up and other Sixties sexual revolutionary sins: he reminds us that for women the pre-contraceptive world was vicious, poor and hard. -- Janice Turner * The Times * The American journalist Jonathan Eig is neither a woman nor, indeed an expert of women's reproductive health (his previous bestsellers, as he points out, were about 'ballplayers and gangsters'). Rather gamely, considering the sensitivities and politics involved, he's chosen to write a history of the development of the birth control pill - and he carries it off with wit, verve and scholarly research. -- Isobel Lerwick * Financial Times *


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