The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra

by JamesMcConnachie (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.45

  How did an ancient Hindu treatise come to be the world's best-known sex manual? Now available in paperback, The Book of Love is the first book to tell the story of the Kamasutra in full. 'A vastly entertaining and consistently intelligent guide to this misunderstood and vaguely disreputable book.' Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $3.45

  The Kamasutra was written in northern India in the third century AD, when erotic culture lay at the heart of an exquisite civilization. The Book of Love is a unique portrait of this sensuous era, evoking the world of the pleasure-seeking men - and women - for whom the book was written. James McConnachie shows that the Kamasutra was always much more than a sex manual: it was a passionate portrayal of an ideal lifestyle that was, even then, under threat from the moralists. He also demonstrates how the outrageous Victorian explorer Richard Burton, with the help of a clandestine coterie of sexual experimenters and iconoclasts, then unleashed this extraordinary volume on English society in an attempt to start a revolution. And how the Kamasutra was driven underground into the hands of pirate pornographers, before being thrust once more into the daylight, in the wake of the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover . The Book of Love tells the story of the life of a work, of how something as fragile as an idea and a way of seeing the world can be cradled between hard covers - and survive.