Masters of Sex

April 20, 2009
Verdict: Award-winning biographer Maier (Dr. Spock: An American Life) delivers the first in-depth look at a complex couple who helped revolutionize the study of human sexual response. Academics and amateur sexperts alike will rejoice. Background: Drawing on interviews with family, friends, former colleagues, and the famously private couple themselves, Maier chronicles the life and research of leading American sex experts Virginia E. Johnson and Dr. William H. Masters, who studied sexual intimacy, orgasms, and sexual dysfunction and satisfaction for over 40 years. The public viewed the couple as experts on relationships and intimacy, but Maier reveals that their 20-year partnership (which ended in divorce) was conflict-ridden..-Troy Reed, Southeast Regional Lib., Gilbert, AZ

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2009
Newsday writer Maier (The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings, 2003, etc.) offers a dry look at the research team who unlocked the secrets of America's bedrooms, ushering in the sexual revolution of the late 1960s.

The authors of Human Sexual Response, the incendiary 1966 primer that inaugurated the field of couples sex therapy, William Masters and Virginia Johnson had been research partners since 1956, when Masters, a doctor specializing in fertility and reproductive dysfunction, hired Johnson as an assistant at Washington University. Johnson, a 31-year-old divorce with two children, was a college graduate from Missouri with little knowledge of medicine but a good deal of aplomb. Masters, ten years her senior and married with two children, had just gotten the green light to explore the uncharted terrain of human sexuality. Warned that he was committing academic suicide, Masters nonetheless delved into the clinical observation of coupling, masturbation, climaxing and performance anxiety. All the while Johnson was at his side, coaching the testing partners, filming, recording data and remaining admirably uncritical. Over ten years the two cemented their research and, discreetly, their amatory partnership. Though they were forced out of the umbrage of the university, they enjoyed remarkable success in their private practice, unseating psychoanalysis as the preferred mode of healing sexual dysfunction. With the publication of their work, they also became famous and rich, though later books on homosexuality and AIDS tarnished their reputations. Maier tries to get at the kernel of this curious and enduring partnership—they finally married in 1971, divorced in 1992—though Masters in particular remains a hard nut to crack, and the narrative lacks the punch that such a subject should merit.

An unsatisfying biography of a bold team whose influence on cultural mores and women's sexual emancipation cannot be underestimated.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from May 1, 2009
He was an ob-gyn on staff at the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Emotionally chilly and egotistical, Masters was interested in researching human sexuality. Johnson was a divorced mother of two, looking for a job and a way to earn a degree. She accepted a job offer as research assistantand sex with Masters as a condition of employment, ostensibly in the name of science. Working together in the 1950s and 1960s, they built on the earlier work of Alfred Kinsey and changed the way Americans looked at sex. Maier goes beyond the image and contributions of this world-famous couple to reveal a driven and calculating man who divorced his faithful wife after 29 years and married Johnson to prevent her from marrying a wealthy benefactor of their clinic. Johnson, though granted equal credit for their work, never got over feelings of inadequacy. She subverted her personality and desires only to have Masters divorce her after 21 years to marry an old sweetheart from his youth. Maier recounts the boldness of their experiments and treatments, controversies surrounding their use of surrogates and study of prostitutes, and their eventual decline as the sexual revolution they sparked raced ahead of them. Based on interviews, Masters unpublished memoir, and clinic documents, Maiers book offers a wonderfully written and totally absorbing look at an amazing couple.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)