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Thomas Laqueur

Thomas Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes about and teaches European cultural history.

From the London Review dated 20 September 2001

In and Out of the Panthéon

  • Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France 1789-1996 by Avner Ben-Amos
  • Monumental Intolerance: Jean Baffier, a Nationalist Sculptor in Fin-de-Siècle France by Neil McWilliam

As Lévi-Strauss might have said, ‘the dead are good to think with.’ But the thoughts they give rise to are seldom as reassuring as one might hope. The dead, and memories of the dead are disruptive, unruly and unpredictable. [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003)
  • Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990)
  • The Invention of Photography and Its Impact on Learning (1990)
  • The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century by Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (1987)
  • Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and English Working Class Culture, 1780-1850 (1977)

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In the LRB archive

Lectures about Heaven · 7 June 2007

subscriber-only content Diary: My Dead Fathers · 7 September 2006

subscriber-only content Unquiet Bodies · 6 April 2006

  • Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism by István Rév  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Four pfennige per track km · 4 November 2004

  • Eichmann: His Life and Crimes by David Cesarani
  • Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence by Janina Struk  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Diary: memories in German · 4 December 2003

subscriber-only content Travelling in the Classic Style · 5 September 2002

  • Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics by Robert Gordon
  • Primo Levi by Ian Thomson
  • The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography by Carole Angier

11 September · 4 October 2001

In and Out of the Panthéon · 20 September 2001

  • Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France 1789-1996 by Avner Ben-Amos
  • Monumental Intolerance: Jean Baffier, a Nationalist Sculptor in Fin-de-Siècle France by Neil McWilliam

subscriber-only content Festival of Punishment · 5 October 2000

  • Proximity to Death by William McFeely
  • Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment edited by Bonnie Bobit

The Old Country · 4 June 1998

  • Heshel's Kingdom by Dan Jacobson
  • Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World by Eva Hoffman

Not currently in the LRB archive

 not available in archive Pint for Pint · 14 October 1999

  • Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce by Douglas Starr

 not available in archive Even Immortality · 29 July 1999

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