Draft:Michael Castleman

Michael Zelig Castleman (born February 2, 1950) is an award-winning American journalist based in San Francisco, who specializes in health and sexuality. During a 35-year-career, he has published 15 nonfiction books and over 3,000 magazine and Web articles. His nonfiction titles have more than 2.5 million copies in print. As a novelist, he has written 4 murder mysteries set in San Francisco that deal, in part, with the city’s rich history.

Castleman’s 19th book, "The Untold Story of Books: A Writer's History of Publishing," was released in 2024. It’s the first history of publishing from an author’s point of view. It chronicles the evolution of book publishing from Gutenberg to Amazon, with special emphasis on the transition from 20th-century industrial publishing to digital publishing in the 21st, and its impact on publishers, distributors, booksellers, and especially authors. Publishers Weekly called it “fascinating … sweeping … rousing account.".

Background
Michael Castleman was born on February 2, 1950 in Brookline, Massachusetts to parents of Ukrainian descent. He grew up in Lynbrook, a Long Island suburb of New York City. His father was a professor of metallurgy at Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn. His mother was a school librarian. Castleman graduated from Malverne High School in 1968 and attended the University of Michigan, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1972. He earned a Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977.

Journalism
In college, Castleman spent most of his non-academic time working to end the war in Vietnam. After graduating, his anti-war, community-organizing efforts led to a job at the Ann Arbor Free Clinic. Castleman quickly saw that most of the clinic’s patients had problems that could have been easily prevented with good health information. He approached the local underground newspaper, the Ann Arbor Sun, with a proposal to write regular health articles.

Castleman wrote for the Sun from 1973 to 1975. Arriving in San Francisco in 1975, he wrote health articles for Pacific News Service, a small anti-war press syndicate that, after the Vietnam war, focused on news the mainstream media ignored.

Castleman became the director of the San Francisco Men’s Reproductive Health Clinic, the nation’s first birth control clinic for men. It distributed thousands of condoms for free years before the AIDS epidemic when the men’s contraceptives were not sold openly. To bring men in, clinic staff received trained by the University of California, San Francisco Human Sexuality Program in brief-intervention sex counseling. Castleman and his colleagues provided information and counseling for those with easily-treated problems, for example, premature ejaculation, and referred those with more complex issues to sex therapists. This model—information, counseling, and when necessary, referral—has informed Castleman’s health and sexuality journalism ever since.

In 1976, Castleman began writing for a quirky Marin County-based health magazine, Medical Self-Care, founded by a renegade doctor who shared Castleman’s passion for disseminating health information. He became its editor in 1979. When Castleman joined Medical Self-Care, it was a 4,000 circulation, black-and-white quarterly with no advertising. A decade later, it was a 100,000 circulation, full-color bimonthly with national advertising, admirers in Congress, and a feature on “60 Minutes.” But Medical Self-Care was chronically under-capitalized, and folded in 1990.

Castleman became a full-time freelance health journalist, writing for dozens of magazines, including: Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Self, Family Circle, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal., The Nation, and Mother Jones. From 1991 to 1995, he answered all the sex questions submitted to the Playboy Advisor.

His magazine health journalism includes:

AARP The Magazine, Family Circle , Ladies Home Journal , Mother Earth News , Mother Jones , Prevention Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian , Yoga Journal

In 2005, at age 55, Castleman retired from general health hournalism to focus on sexuality, sex therapy, and sex research. Since 2009, he has written the twice-monthly blog “All About Sex” for PsychologyToday.com. Castleman’s more than 350 posts have attracted more than 60 million views, making him the world’s most popular sexuality writer. His sexuality journalism has also appeared on many Web sites, among them: WebMD, Playboy.com, and Salon.com.

Non-Fiction

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