Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade.

• Author: Rocawich, Linda
• Position: Brief Article

It's a bane of existence, if you edit the book section of a magazine, to have reviewers who never quite manage to get you the review. And so I turn to a book that deserved its place in these pages but never got it.

It's another written by a friend whose name will be familiar to our faithful readers. David J. Garrow. His most recent contribution to this magazine was an interview with Lani Guinier (September 1993 issue) and whose previous book Bearing the Cross, a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and now he has written a worthy successor.

Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (Macmillan) is a thorough, exhaustive, chatty, and gossipy history of the movement for reproductive rights, beginning in the living rooms of Connecticut where the birth-control case (Griswold v. Connecticut) was born, through the garage sale in Texas that...