Volume 38, Number 11 · June 13, 1991
The Birth of the Two-Sex World
By Stephen Jay Gould
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
by Thomas Laqueur
Harvard University Press, 313 pp., $27.95
Several years ago, as I watched Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn in the movie version of Same Time, Next Year, I realized that this overt comedy of sex and romance expressed a much more subtle and expansive theme as its primary subject. By featuring a couple that meets but one weekend a year for their well-hidden affair, dramatist (and scriptwriter) Bernard Slade found a wonderful device for telling the cultural history of America during a quarter century. (Alda, for example, turns from a counterculture hanger-on in the later 1960s, espousing a philosophy of 'tell all' and 'express your feelings' until a call from Burstyn's husband elicits some last-minute caution, to an embittered, political reactionary after losing a son in Vietnam.) Alda and Burstyn may be sometime lovers, but they are also a synecdoche for American history.
Review, 3653 words
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