Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade.

It's a bane of existence, if you edit the book section of a magazine, to have reviewers who never quite manage to get you the review. And so I turn to a book that deserved its place in these pages but never got it.

It's another written by a friend whose name will be familiar to our faithful readers. David J. Garrow. His most recent contribution to this magazine was an interview with Lani Guinier (September 1993 issue) and whose previous book Bearing the Cross, a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and now he has written a worthy successor.

Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (Macmillan) is a thorough, exhaustive, chatty, and gossipy history of the movement for reproductive rights, beginning in the living rooms of Connecticut where the birth-control case (Griswold v. Connecticut) was born, through the garage sale in Texas that led to Roe v. Wade, and on to the Supreme Court's two hearings of arguments about Roe, its decision, and its aftermath.

Several years ago, when Garrow began this book, it looked as if a woman's right to choose abortion, as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, was in jeopardy. The situation is different now; the Court's decision looks like a lasting one, but women's right to choose is shredding into nothingness as the anti-abortion movement intimidates doctor after doctor after doctor into giving up their abortion practices.

Women and men fought hard, for decades, to achieve the right to choose. Their story is here, in Liberty and Sexuality. Don't forget them.