God's Doodle

September 2, 2013
British historian Hickman (Churchill’s Bodyguard) delivers a history of the penis and all things phallic that is both absolutely serious and has its tongue somewhere near its literary cheek. Divided into four broad subject areas, Hickman surveys penis size (“Few males when grown to man’s estate free themselves entirely from some preoccupation with penis size”); phallic culture (“genital oath-taking” in ancient Greece and Rome); fear of castration (15th-century treatments for gonorrhea ranged “from washing the genitals in vinegar to plunging the penis into a freshly killed chicken”); and the biology and physics of penile activity (the hypothalamus causes men to sexually scrutinize all women they see). Along the way, Hickman provides a brief history of sexual lingo, including the early Anglo-Saxon sard and the 16th-century shag (“Shakespeare favoured the variant shog”), and offers praise for the sexual prowess of 17th-century castrati (“losing testicles does not mean losing the ability to get erections and even to ejaculate”). Overall, Hickman’s book is entertaining and informative.

October 15, 2013
This isn't a very long book, but it's not the page count that matters; it's what the author does with it. And he does a lot. Although categorized as humor (because, hey, penises are intrinsically funny), the book is actually a remarkably entertaining and informative look at the male organ down through the ages: the evolution not of the penis itself (which, let's face it, hasn't really changed) but of our perceptions of and attitudes toward it. We get some history, some religion, some sociology, some linguistics (dick comes out of rhyming slang, dickory dock for cock, and nut derives from nutmeg), and some myth-busting (the size of a man's organ doesn't correlate to the size of his hands or feet or nose). This is an undeniably funny bookthe author quotes an excerpt of a D. H. Lawrence novel, noting the penis' tumescent thicket of exclamation marks but it's also packed with plenty of things you probably never even knew (like, for example, the centuries-long religious kerfuffle surrounding the holy foreskin: the part of the baby Jesus that was removed at circumcision). Fascinating stuff.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)