Modern Lusts

<p> As a jazz musician filmmaker anthropologist sexologist and crime novelist the boundlessly curious German autodidact Ernest Borneman exemplified the conflicting cultural and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In this long-awaited English translation acclaimed historian Detlef Siegfried chronicles Borneman's journey from a young Jewish Communist in Nazi Berlin to his emergence as a celebrated (and reliably controversial) transatlantic polymath. Through an innovative structure organized around the human senses this biography memorably portrays a figure whose far-flung obsessions comprised a microcosm of postwar intellectual life.</p>