Greta LaFleur's first book-length work has caught the attention of scholars in the field of early American sexuality, racial science, and environmental studies. Indeed, a good portion of the book has been vetted over the past decade in the form of refereed articles and conference papers.LaFleur's central (and frequently repeated) argument is that the concept of modern sexuality—the subjectivist, individualist construct postulated by Michel Foucault—must be set aside in efforts to theorize sexuality as it was understood in the eighteenth century. Attitudes toward sexuality and race in early America were offshoots of an understanding of the collective human body as radically shaped by its various environments, as a porous envelope. If the archives that have heretofore been central to the study of the history of sexuality are those that prioritize the subject (such as diaries), argues LaFleur, we must now instead look at texts that were perceived as sexual but represented sexuality at a distance from subjective experience. These include the natural historians such as Carolus Linnaeus and George-Louis Buffon, but more particularly, the echoes of their work in a variety of popular narratives. In separate chapters, LaFleur examines four categories of these: Barbary captivity narratives, sermons and pamphlets surrounding criminal executions, cross-dressing narratives, and antivice narratives.