Customer Reviews

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Just a short humorous note to affirm the rapturous reviews from the major sources cited above. Yes, the book is just as splendid as they have said. And just as important.

...an excellent book. Extremely well written and extensively researched. The rather long winded review above sums it up perfectly. (I'm just sitting around catching up on all the books I've meant to review but haven't gotten around to yet...)

I will give this book the five stars it deserves for being so well-written and researched. However, the political and social viewpoints of both Carpenter and Rowbotham are quite far from my own, and I can only admire such people from a vague, general standpoint. As a gay man, and owning several of Carpenter's books, I admit that I owe a great debt to Carpenter for his work as a pioneer of gay lib. But I also know that Orwell was so right in his sarcastic comment about crankish, sandal-wearing leftists, a direct reference to Carpenter. One thing above all others that irritates me about Carpenter's sexual theories is the almost bizarre degree of self-delusion that led him to justify relationships between a middle-class man and a working-class man by claiming that such relationships were "democratic" in their crossing of class boundaries. Was he somehow oblivious to the fact that when a middle-class man picks up a prostitute, they are crossing class boundaries? I myself have (in the distant past) picked up young men from the gutter, quite literally, and this was surely a crossing of class boundaries, but I never thought of it as "democratic" or socialistic or revolutionary, and most certainly never thought of it as a species of Marxism in action.