Phallus: The History of an Obsession Paperback – March 29, 2017

Its a nice read, especially for those of us that tend to be androphilic in nature. I had no idea how many famous guys in history were this way and how many cultures in the past revered the phallus until reading this author's historic account. It is nice having this positive overview of the beauty of the phallus when modern feminist and sex negative religions are constantly putting down the phallus and putting it in a negative light.

The intro was very enticing, would like to get more!

Interesting stories about Leonardo da Vinci times and contemporary italian renaissance artists !!!A lot of repeat stories from other books from the same author .

I bought it because the first few pages were good and well written. It showed historical art and described mythological figures, and so it connected a great fascination of man with the way it has played out in the real world.At around 23%, though, it's started including social interpretation that is fairly simplistic and at any rate both subjective and not well reasoned. It dismisses the whole Catholic church over their imperfect enforcement of their norms for treating minors, chastising anyone who retains any sympathy with the overall organization ("tsk tsk"), just pages after idolizing numerous historical figures and organizations that openly support and endorse and sometimes outright traffic in sex with teenagers. It then talks about military porn, with an odd detour about how in porn the author doesn't prefer, all military people are depicted as looking alike and are way too buff. A little later, it explains the differences between "American boys" versus "European boys", saying for example that European boys don't believe in God. I checked the stats on that to see, and it doesn't match up too well. Pew reports that 74% of Europeans believe in some form of higher spiritual force.I hit my limits when it started talking about narcissistic people and then breaking down categories of them. The text writes as it's an objective category whether someone is a "good boy" narcissist or a more run of the mill variety. Narcissists, we are told, are bound by no law to their occasional friends. They sulk and give the silent treatment, and they threaten people with abandonment. They spend all their time trying to get even. No one is safe from being cut off by a narcissist; they'll even cut off a family member! I'm not sure this matches a real-world objective category of person rather than being something we say about our personal enemies. The book doesn't define its terms, and anyway I'm not sure what this has to do with the subject matter.All in all, the book has lots of shock fodder. It is written in all bold face. Not much of it is fact checked. A lot of it has tangential recommendations for another book by the author. (For more about so and so, you can read my book XYZ!!). It's a little bit like reading a curated section of Twitter, organized by topic and filtered by number of views.I give it two stars because it should be interesting for what it is. For me, though, it kept throwing me out of immersion. It says provocative things, and I think about them, and then I see the holes in it and feel suspicious about other things the book is going to say. As well, the book is limited in its compassion. It categorically chastises large swaths of humanity with no humor or consideration of the context.

Good read

Good reading. It is a historical account. Very interesting

If I had you thumb through this book and asked you what you thought it was called…the last thing you would say is PHALLUS!!! There are no beautiful or tantalizing images of men celebrating their manhood…the tiny poorly printed images of nude swimmers not withstanding.

I have no complaint about the topic Hone has chosen for this tome. But the writing is just dreadful, filled with inaccuracies—words used incorrectly, spelling errors on almost every page, homonyms used incorrectly—that an editor should have caught. Much of this book reads like an unedited high school research paper rough draft. And 43 of his 46 “footnotes” that reference his sources are his own books.