At a time when America's faculties of taste and judgment—along with the sense of the sacred and shameful—have become utterly vacant, Rochelle Gurstein's The Repeal of Reticence delivers an important and troubling warning. Covering landmark developments in America's modern culture and law, she charts the demise of what was dismissively called "gentility" in the face of First Amendment triumphs for journalists, sex educators, and novelists—from Margaret Sanger's advocacy of birth control to Judge Woolsey's celebrated defense of Ulysses. Weaving together a study of the legal debates over obscenity and free speech with a cultural study of the critics and writers who framed the issues, Gurstein offers a trenchant reconsideration of the sacred value of privacy.

DIVAmerica's preeminent First Amendment lawyer speaks out on the most controversial free-speech issues of our time/div

On female sexual morality

A provocative look at the rise of youth culture, the worship of perpetual adolescence, and the sorry spectacle of adults shirking the responsibilities of maturity. Firebrand conservative columnist Diana West looks at the mess America is in and wonders "Where did all the grown-ups go?" Diana West sees a US filled with middle-age guys playing air guitar and thinks "No wonder we can't stop Islamic terrorism." She sees a landscape littered with Baby Britneys, Moms Who Mosh, and Dads too "young" to call themselves "mister" and wonders "Is there a single adult left anywhere?" But, the grown-ups are all gone. The disease that killed them was incubated in the sixties to a rock-and-roll score, took hold in the seventies with the help of multicultralism and left us with a nation of eternal adolescents who can't decide between "good" and "bad", a generation who can't say "no". With insightful wit, Diana West takes readers on an odyssey through culture and politics, from the rise of rock ‘n' roll to the rise of multiculturalism, from the loss of identity to the discovery of "diversity," from the emasculation of the heroic ideal to the "PC"-ing of "Mary Poppins," all the while building a compelling case against the childishness that is subverting the struggle against jihadist Islam in a mixed-up, post-9/11 world. From the inability to nix a sixteen year-old's request for Marilyn Manson concert tickets to offering adolescents parentally-funded motel rooms on prom night to rationalizing murderous acts of Islamic suicide bombers with platitudes of cultural equivalence, West sees us on a slippery slope that's lead to a time when America has forgotten its place in the world. The result of such indecisiveness is, ultimately, the end of Western civilization as we know it. Diana West serves up a provocative critique of our dangerously indecisive world leavened with humor and shot through with insight.

In The Long March, Roger Kimball shows how the ''cultural revolution'' of the 1960s and 70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and in our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change ''cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals,'' he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other ''cultural revolutionaries'' who made their mark.For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke todays ''culture wars.'' The Long March fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.