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Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. By Edward de Grazia. (New York: Vintage, 1993. xvi, 814 pp. Paper, $17.00, ISBN 0-679-74341-3.)
Edward de Grazia, a lawyer and hipster who has fought the good fight for Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Lenny Bruce, has composed an 814-page tome that is part celebrity gossip, part self-promotion (thirty-nine references to himself in the index, including "Mailer's description of"), and very small part legal analysis. Because de Grazia continues to be excited by the clich that the history of "obscenity" (his quotation marks) is the story of hard-won battles of martyred geniuses for free expression against prudes and philistines, he apparently feels no obligation to make an actual argument about the meaning of this long-enduring debate over what should appear in public, how and why its...