read about these in the globe and mail;

Woohoo! Two books about the male body! “The average length of the adult male penis is approximately five times greater than that of an adult gorilla,” says Mels van Driel, a Dutch urologist who, away from the examination room, seems to have spent his life researching the history of the penis.

Why is the human penis so big? Maybe there’s an evolutionary explanation, van Driel says. “A relatively long penis may have been intended to scare off other males.” Or perhaps the reason is that the man with the longest penis has the greatest chance of delivering his sperm safely.

Reviewed here: Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis, by Mels van Driel; The Naked Man: A Study of the Male Body, by Desmond Morris
Finally, after endless knowing smiles from women and arch looks across the dinner table about The Vagina Monologues, men have a book of their own to display, not that it will have the oomph of The Vagina Monologues. But van Driel’s book at least shows that discussions of the male organ of generation can be jolly and fun, and there’s more to it than just the endless black night of male oppression of which we have heard so much for the past 30 years.

Van Driel wants to do two things: to inform readers about the anatomy and workings of the penis, scrotum and the rest of it, doing so lightheartedly and with humour, as though a slightly boozy uncle were instructing you about how machine guns work; second, to entertain.

This is not a heavy book. Van Driel has read enormously in classical literature and folklore and wears his learning lightly, as we revisit the observation of 1950s U.S. sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that “between 70 and 80 per cent of men hang to the left.” Or learn that the first magnetic resonance imaging study of coitus was achieved in the author’s hometown of Groningen in the Netherlands in the 1990s. The couple had to make love in the narrow tunnel of the MRI scanner. (Many of the men sought out as experimental subjects were unable to perform.)

Why are men unable to perform, if given adequate stimuli? Van Driel says erectile failure stems from dim historic fears of the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth that may cut the organ off upon entry. “The fear of the vagina dentata and the accompanying premature loss of erection before entering are as old as mankind.” What can we do to keep our erections? “The only thing that works is to talk about it.”

It’s a bit surprising that a book so practical – for those interested in their organs of reproduction – and so lacking in academic-speak would be distributed by a learned outfit such as the University of Chicago Press. Maybe it was the press that insisted on the subtitle, The Rise and Fall of the Penis, as though a book that more resembles a farmer’s almanac required a heavy academic thesis in order to merit publishing.

But readers searching for a sequential account of such a rise and fall – unless the title is an editor’s wry joke – will be disappointed. Van Driel is an entertaining clinician, not a historian.

Or maybe the press wanted to surf the sex wave currently coursing through the senior common rooms. It’s starting to become clear that sexuality has a history of its own, that what we do in bed does change historically from one period to the next and has more episodes than, say, a history of respiration. Students of homosexuality have probably pursued the serious history of sexuality most avidly, because they tend to be investigating in the service of a cause. But sex is the theme du jour in the academy right now, and van Driel’s learning should sit well in the senior common room. He has simply read so much, in addition to having the practical knowledge of being urologist and sexologist since 1983.

One more point: Manhood will make a good present as well, if your guy is preoccupied with all the little bumps and wiggles of his organ, and would like to be amused as he discovers useful facts about it.

Meanwhile, English zoologist Desmond Morris is back (yet again)! He became a household name after his vastly successful The Naked Ape in 1967, and more recently The Naked Woman, plus 44 other books. Here, then, is a follow-up, the kind of thing Morris seems to spin off in the course of an afternoon.

The argument, of course, is sensational but breathtakingly implausible and simple-minded: Humans in early stages of evolution had to outwit tigers, so their brains started to swell. To outsmart the predators, they had to stand up on their hind legs. You can see the rest of the argument coming from a mile away: Everything that has happened to our bodies over the past 100,000 years was predestined by the tigers to occur.

From the viewpoint of current thinking about evolutionary biology, this is totally embarrassing. Such speculative rumination in front of the evening fire is what Morris has made his reputation on. But quite frankly, it’s a waste of time. The book is organized by parts of the male body, as Morris tells us that men have big shoulders because they needed to carry weapons: Every body part that we men have, we needed to acquire in order better to assert ourselves. (What happens to the argument if women today, given a rigorous regimen of working out, can perform comparably to males or even best them?)

Compared with Van Driel's lighthearted approach to the penis, Morris is plodding and pedantic. Rather than giving the book as a present, I suggest that anyone hapless enough to receive it fling it into the fire.

Edward Shorter is a professor of history at the University of Toronto, and the author of many books, including A History of Women’s Bodies and Written in the Flesh: The History of Desire."