The birth-con­trol pill has been called the most impor­tant inven­tion of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Yet its cre­ation was any­thing but cer­tain. This is the sto­ry of the eclec­tic group who cre­at­ed the pill against over­whelm­ing odds: Gre­go­ry Pin­cus, the young sci­en­tist who was fired from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty and forced to launch his own lab in a garage; Mar­garet Sanger, the rad­i­cal fem­i­nist whose beliefs about sex fright­ened the old guard; Katharine McCormick, the phil­an­thropist with a trou­bled past who bankrolled the research; and John Rock, the Catholic doc­tor with movie-star looks who bat­tled his own church to win pub­lic sup­port. Their sto­ry is told here with remark­able detail and nar­ra­tive force by one of Amer­i­ca’s fore­most pop­u­lar his­to­ri­ans. Jonathan Eig deliv­ers both a grip­ping sci­en­tif­ic sus­pense sto­ry and a pow­er­ful social and cul­tur­al history.