Angus Nicholls, Hans Blumenberg on Myth and the Human Sciences  New York and London, Routledge, 2015, 277 pages, hardcover £90, e-version £34,99, ISBN: 978-0-415-88549-2 I am fully convinced that this book will become an important tool in research and teaching, not only on the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) but in the wider areas of myth and anthropology. It may even be of interest to an even more diverse audience, bringing a new level of complexity to current debates between religion and evolutionary theory. The title of the book itself holds the possibility of bridging the gap between cultural studies and natural sciences and reclaims the term “science” from the latter. It demonstrates, through Blumenberg’s work, how interwoven mythologies and the natural sciences actually are. The border between logos and myth is, according to Blumenberg, a fictive one. Nicholls’ monograph is the very first comprehensive English-language introduction to Blumenberg’s theory of myth, but even compared with introductions that are available in German,

it is unique in its commitment to making Blumenberg’s arguments accessible combined with an extraordinary depth of scholarship on his intellectual background. Blumenberg’s highly original theory of myth, outlined in the volume Work on Myth (1979; English translation 1985), distinguishes him as the most important German theorist of myth of the second half of the twentieth-century. His work has resonated internationally across academic disciplines ranging from literary theory, philosophy, religious studies and anthropology, to the history and philosophy of science. Blumenberg’s theory of myth is deeply related to debates within the broad field known as the 'human sciences,' particularly to philosophical anthropology and evolutionary biology. Emerging from his view of humans as 'creatures of deficiency' – organisms which, by virtue of their capacity for reflective thought, find themselves at odds with the order of nature – his theory breaks with enlightenment ideas by ascribing to myth a rational function. Indeed, the distinctive feature of Blumenberg’s approach is his…

Tommy Dickinson, Curing Queers: Mental Nurses and their Patients, 1935-74, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013, 272 pages, £70, ISBN 978-0-7190-9588-7 (hbk). Tom Waidzunas, The Straight Line: How the Fringe Science of Ex-Gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality, Minneapolis MN and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 336 pages, £65.47 (hbk), £19.07 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-8166-9614-7 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-8166-9615-4 (pbk). In late 2015, the international campaigning organisation ‘All Out’ launched a new website: Gay Cure Watch. The aim of this was to monitor and ultimately shut down individuals and groups offering so-called reorientation therapies, in which attempts to convert LGBT people to heterosexuality and gender conformity are offered under the guise of medical science. ‘We know you can’t catch “gay” and you can’t cure it either’, the site proclaims. The process through which homosexuality, and particularly male homosexuality in north America and Europe, came to be seen as a matter for medical science over and above legal, religious, or moral considerations has been well-documented; the standpoints of both

Gay Cure Watch and the organisations against which it campaigns are legacies of this. They are not the whole story, though, and the story is not a simple one. We urgently need to understand the myriad ways in which theories, practices, and activism surrounding reorientation therapies have been used, by whom, and with what intended and unintended outcomes. Tommy Dickinson’s Curing Queers and Tom Waidzunas’s The Straight Line are both valuable contributions towards answering these complex questions. Curing Queers delves into the history of aversion therapy in Britain. It is rooted in original oral history interviews, conducted not only with eight individuals who received such treatment to cure them of homosexuality, but also with 17 nurses who were involved in providing it. The goal is to examine their experiences, their impressions and their motivations as they attempted to cure or be cured, and the memories shared in these interviews are deployed effectively throughout. The first two chapters situate…