Lust on Trial

This book was FASCINATING. As a history major, I find this US legal history to be supremely interesting. The narrative style of nonfiction was enjoyable to read.

I think this book could really work for the Composition classroom. It is well written and interesting, but in addition to showing a history of the treatment of sex in America, this text provides a wealth of discussion and writing topics, as well as providing a way to encourage students to draw parallels between history and contemporary America. Will use!

This is the story of how Anthony comstocks life and how he became the new York Secretary for the suppression of vice though it lags at times it's well worth reading

Unfortunately I did not finish this book, the content was interesting but the pacing of it was quite slow. It was more my error than the writer, as it is probably one I shouldn't have requested! A big yes for fans of American history though!

This book on Anthony Comstock sounded so interesting, but it just wasn't as good as it should have been. It's hard to make history exciting sometimes, but the liveliness of prose and the art of storytelling can transform even the dullest topics into gripping narratives. The topic (Sex! Nudity! Morals to the wind!) gave enough titillation that in better hands it could have been something better. I hate to give bad ratings to histories when the work is solid, but I'm disappointed.

I’m surprised by my less than enthusiastic reaction to this book because it seems like the perfect book I’d love. I think my biggest reserves are due to the murkiness on what the book is about. Is about Anthony Comstock, or is it about the history of sexual censorship? It gives the impression of both, but sometimes there are pages on pages of analyzing different paintings that were considered controversial to the time or things of that ilk. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can feel a bit like two analytic pieces being shoved into a single book. Amy Werbel’s interest in the subject as well as the research that went into it are evident on every page, and she’s done such a lovely job of presenting her research in this book.

This isn’t a criticism of the book itself or the author, but the formatting for the Kindle version of this e-galley was terrible. All kinds of punctuation, capitalization, indentation, etc. errors that made it extremely difficult to read. Sometimes the sentence would skip down two lines in the middle of a paragraph, so then there was this random broken line (occasionally with a page number thrown into that empty space?) in a paragraph that would pick up two lines down. It was extremely annoying to try to get through in that regard. Again, this isn’t a criticism of the author or the actual content of the book because this is solely about the formatting!