I'll never write a book so fine or so fascinating as Making sex, but I can and will improve on it. Here is the first sentence:
An interpretive chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of the same story of death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with the problem of distinguishing real from apparent death.
I shall improve it stylistically and substantively. First, I delete the egregiously superfluous "interpretive." Already it's better. Next a flurry of other changes. So I have
A chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of a story concerning death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with distinguishing death from its living double.
Now I home in on a substantive problem: Laqueur never explains the fifty year gap mentioned in his opening. He cites three interpretations of Jacques-Jean Bruhier's story: Bruhier's own (an edition dated 1749 is cited; the first ed. appeared in 1742), Antoine Louis's (1752), and Michael Ryan's (the 1836 edition provides the date Laqueur cites). What happened, Thomas?
Context suggests that Laqueur located the chasm between Louis and Ryan.
A chasm separates two interpretations, eighty-four years apart, of a story
concerning death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician
obsessed with distinguishing death from its living double.
