Everybody
A Book About Freedom
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Narrated by:
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Elizabeth Sastre
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By:
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Olivia Laing
About this listen
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 BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
- By: Alicia Elliott
- Narrated by: Kyla Garcia
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated as a mind spread out on the ground. In this urgent, visceral work, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of the personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas experienced by her so many Native people. Elliott's deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and White communities - a divide reflected in her own family - and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation.
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Well written, heartfelt, revealing
- By KWK on 07-15-24
By: Alicia Elliott
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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The Man in the Red Coat
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker, and man of science with a famously complicated private life....
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Pathetic narration makes this title unbearable
- By Chris Quigg on 02-27-20
By: Julian Barnes
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Antigone Rising
- The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths
- By: Helen Morales
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
A witty, inspiring reckoning with the ancient Greek and Roman myths and their legacy, from what they can illuminate about #MeToo to the radical imagery of Beyoncé.
By: Helen Morales
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"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself"
- The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945
- By: Florian Huber
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death - for themselves and for their children.
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This book should be required reading for anyone that seeks to understand how ordinary people could be transformed into monsters.
- By Anonymous User on 05-08-20
By: Florian Huber
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The Long March
- How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
- By: Roger Kimball
- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The architects of America's cultural revolution of the 1960s were Beat authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated figures like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, and Susan Sontag. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Roger Kimball conceives a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead-ends, and blind alleys.
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The Long March
- By Suzanne on 05-16-06
By: Roger Kimball
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Existentialism and Excess
- The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre
- By: Gary Cox
- Narrated by: Matt Addis
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the undisputed giants of 20th-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism, combined with his creative and artistic flair, have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high-profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion.
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a capitalista biography of Sartre
- By Anonymous User on 01-24-20
By: Gary Cox
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Capture
- Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering
- By: David A. Kessler MD
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Why do we think, feel, and act in ways we wish we did not? For decades, New York Times best-selling author Dr. David A. Kessler has studied this question with regard to tobacco, food, and drugs. Over the course of these investigations, he identified one underlying mechanism common to a broad range of human suffering. This phenomenon - capture - is the process by which our attention is hijacked and our brains commandeered by forces outside our control.
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Confused
- By TS on 05-17-16
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What listeners say about Everybody
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Elephi
- 07-02-21
Superb
An astonishingly good book. Erudite, illuminating, wide in scope and ultimately empowering. Do read it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Annelena L.
- 07-13-21
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.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Thomas E. Manes
- 05-31-21
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Rod Granger
- 04-28-24
Essential and amazing
The narrator is clear and nuanced. The book is so important for these times addressing body politics, repression and racism.
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- Anna Martine
- 01-30-23
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.
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- Laura L.
- 10-07-21
Could not get into this one
I found myself struggling with this book, had to make the decision to put it down. Maybe at a later date, for now it was not a very interesting listen. Performance/reading was great, it was more the storyline that I could not stay focused on.
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