ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle Goldberg is a peripatetic journalist and author who has always been fascinated by the intersection of ideology, sex and politics. Her first book, the New York Times bestseller “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism” (WW Norton), delved into some of the reddest precincts of the United States to expose the ascendant politico-religious fundamentalism dominating the Republican Party and, at the time, the Bush administration. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it “an impressive piece of lucid journalism…carefully researched and riveting.” It was a finalist for the 2007 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.

After “Kingdom Coming” came out, Goldberg spent the next two years traveling the globe to research “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World,” which Penguin Press will publish in April. Reported from four continents, “The Means of Reproduction” is about the international battle over reproductive rights. Women’s freedom, Goldberg argues, is key to addressing both overpopulation and rapid population decline, helping the third world climb out of poverty and retarding the spread of AIDS. Yet attempts to improve women's status and give them greater control over their own bodies elicit fierce opposition from conservatives who see women's submission as key to their own identity. In 2008, “The Means of Reproduction” won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award . The judges described it as “a book of vaulting ambition and intellectual passion. Michelle Goldberg looks at literally the entire world through the prism of women's issues and women's rights. From abortion to female circumcision, from sexual trafficking to abstinence-only programs, from Poland to Ethiopia to Nicaragua, she examines the conflict between self-determination and patriarchal tradition.”

Before she started writing books, Goldberg was a senior writer for Salon.com. Her work has also appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation , New York, The Guardian (UK) and The New Republic. She is a contributing editor at Religion Dispatches and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, where she has recently started writing a bi-monthly web column about human rights and foreign policy. Goldberg has reported from countries including Uganda, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, India and Argentina. She has taught at NYU’s Graduate School of Journalism, lectured throughout the United States and in Europe, and has been interviewed on hundreds of radio shows, including Fresh Air with Terry Gross. When she’s not on the road, she spends as much time as possible in her Cobble Hill, Brooklyn neighborhood with her husband, Matthew Ipcar.

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Preorder The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World

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The Rise of Christian Nationalism

ADVANCE PRAISe for THE MEANS OF REPRODUCTION

"We know how to radically improve women's lives around the world: give them education, power, and the liberty to control of their own bodies. We also know something even more important: that improving women's lives in this way makes the whole world better place—healthier, more prosperous, and more secure. Michelle Goldberg's sweeping saga about how this consensus came about, and the tragic impediments to putting it into practice, may be the most important book you'll ever read about the future of the human race."

–Rick Perlstein author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fall of the American Consensus

Goldberg's book is more than a scrupulously researched chronicle of the brutalities inflicted on women throughout the underdeveloped world by the determination of antedeluvian religious institutions, and governments that protect them, to control female bodies. What this book demonstrates convincingly is that there can be no economic progress in any country that denies women basic human rights, and that women cannot exercise their human rights if they cannot determine when to have sex, whether or when to marry, and how many children they have. Ms. Goldberg's message is that the repression of women lies at the heart of all oppressive societies"

–Susan Jacoby, author of The age of American Unreason

“The Means of Reproduction is a bold and vital book, a story about life and those who twist that word to front for agendas of sexual control around the world. We're lucky that we have Michelle Goldberg, a brilliant and clear-eyed journalist, to bring us news of how the struggle over reproductive rights has gone global, as the American Right teams up with reactionary forces abroad. Goldberg calls it one of the most important fights of our time; after you read The Means of Reproduction, you will, too. A landmark book.”

— Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author of The Family

PRAISe for Kingdom coming

“Michelle Goldberg has done the impossible. She's written a serious, scathing, eye-opening expose of the ongoing takeover of our country by rightwing Christians– and somehow managed to make it witty, funny, and humane. If it were satire, Kingdom Coming would be hilarious. Unfortunately, it's all true – things are even worse than you thought. Read it while you can!”

–Katha Pollitt, columnist, The Nation ; author, Virginity or Death! : And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time

 
“Michelle Goldberg ventured into the heartland of American fundamentalist extremism -- and returned to warn us of the authoritarian ambitions that lie behind the moralistic posturing of the religious right.  Every patriot who still cherishes the freedoms we inherited from the nation’s founders should read her book.”

– Joe Conason, author of The Hunting of the President, Big Lies, and The Raw Deal

 “Kingdom Coming reveals just how thoroughly our national discourse has been corrupted by the mad work of religious literalists.  Goldberg demonstrates — elegantly and persuasively— that tens of millions of our neighbors are working each day to obliterate the separation between church and state, to supplant scientific rationality with Iron Age fantasies, and to achieve a Christian theocracy in the 21st century. This is a terrifying and necessary book.”

–Sam Harris, author, The End of Faith

“Tocqueville said in 1840, 'Various forms of religious madness are quite common in the United States.'  Michelle Goldberg demonstrates that various forms of religious madness are still quite common. Tocqueville thought that American democracy could contain the danger. Can it still? Only with an effort. That is Michelle Goldberg's well-illustrated and eloquently expressed point, and she is right to make that point, and we had better pay attention.”

– Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and Power and the Idealists