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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
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Who Wrote the Book of Love? Hardback - 2005

by Lee Siegel

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Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for this comic fiction. The author recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the 1950s and the ways in which those sentiments impacted notions about sex and falling in love.

Reader reviews for Who Wrote the Book of Love?

From the publisher

Who Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex--beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love.

Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love.

"Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.

Details

  • Title Who Wrote the Book of Love?
  • Author Lee Siegel
  • Binding Hardback
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 248
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
  • Publication date 2005-08
  • Features Dust Cover
  • ISBN 9780226757001 / 0226757005
  • Weight 1.12 lbs (0.51 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.12 x 6.34 x 0.95 in (23.16 x 16.10 x 2.41 cm)
  • Category Fiction - Historical
  • Library of Congress subjects Boys, Love stories
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2005000539
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

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Citations

  • Booklist, 05/01/2005, Page 1572
  • Ingram Advance, 05/01/2005, Page 85

About the author

Lee Siegel is the author of numerous books, including Love in a Dead Language and Love and Other Games of Chance.

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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Siegel, Lee

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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Siegel, Lee

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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Siegel, Lee

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
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University of Chicago Press, 2005. Hardcover. Very Good. 6x1x9. Hardcover with dust jacket. Pages are clean and unmarked. Covers show very minor shelving wear. Binding is tight, hinges strong. Dust jacket shows light edge wear.; 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed! Ships same or next business day!
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Siegel, Lee

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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Siegel, Lee

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Siegel, Lee

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  • Hardback
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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9780226757001 / 0226757005
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Siegel, Lee

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
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University of Chicago Press. New in New dust jacket. 2005. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. 0226757005 . Book and DJ New. NO notes, names or ANY markings. New DJ not clipped. ; 235 pages .
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?
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Who Wrote the Book of Love?

by Siegel, Lee

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9780226757001 / 0226757005
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University of Chicago Press, 2005-08-01. Hardcover. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title!
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