Nazi Germany

The Case of California (New Edition)

Imprint:

FORTHCOMING Fall 2025

Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast through such varied social and cultural artifacts as bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, Marilyn Monroe, milk-carton images of missing children, orgies, Mickey Mouse, zombies, teenage slang, shock therapy, and surf music, The Case of California offers a dizzying psycho-history of the twentieth century as crystallized in[…]

Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy

Imprint:

Published: 06/27/2024

The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work—the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues—present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer,[…]

On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery

Imprint:

Published: 05/15/2024

In 1936, at age nineteen, Dorothea Buck followed the trail of a star along the mudflats of her North Sea home, Wangerooge Island in Germany. Hospitalized at a Christian institution called Bethel, she was sterilized under Nazi law upon a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Buck lost her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher—the sterilized could not[…]