{"product_id":"9781429941730","title":"The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn engaging, enlightening \"biography\" of the ancient Hindu manuscript that became the world's most famous sex manual\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eKamasutra \u003c\/i\u003eis one of the world's best-known yet least-understood texts, its title instantly familiar but its actual contents widely misconstrued. In the popular imagination, it is a work of practical pornography, a how-to guide of absurdly acrobatic sexual techniques. Yet the book began its long life in third-century India as something quite different: a seven-volume vision of an ideal life of urbane sophistication, offering advice on matters from friendship to household decoration. Over the ensuing centuries, the \u003ci\u003eKamasutra \u003c\/i\u003ewas first celebrated, then neglected, and very nearly lost—until an outrageous adventurer introduced it to the West and earned literary immortality.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn lively and lucid prose, James McConnachie provides a rare, intimate look at the exquisite civilization that produced this cultural cornerstone. He details the quest of famed explorer Richard F. Burton, who—along with his clandestine coterie of libertines and iconoclasts—unleashed the \u003ci\u003eKamasutra \u003c\/i\u003eon English society as a deliberate slap at Victorian prudishness and paternalism. And he describes how the \u003ci\u003eKamasutra \u003c\/i\u003ewas driven underground into the hands of pirate pornographers, until the end of the \u003ci\u003eLady Chatterley \u003c\/i\u003eobscenity ban thrust it once more into contentious daylight.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe first work to tell the full story of the \u003ci\u003eKamasutra\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Book of Love \u003c\/i\u003eexplores how a remarkable way of looking at the world came to be cradled between book covers—and survived.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Holt, Henry \u0026 Company, Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47141701255408,"sku":"9781429941730","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781429941730_p0.jpg?v=1769901958","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781429941730","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}