God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis - Hardcover

TOM HICKMAN has worked as a journalist on national magazines, newspapers and for the BBC. His books include a biography of Churchill’s wartime bodyguard; the story of the BBC during World War Two; the experience of the Bevin Boys, sent to work in the coalmines during it; and of post-war National Service after it. He has also written a history of changing sexual mores during the 20th century.

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 book—the 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. --David Pitt