A fascinating look at the worship of the phallus since ancient times. People also worship the female counterpart.

Worship of the phallus is still around today, example in Thailand.

Of all the disputes of modern times, the most difficult to reconcile in a dual gender world is the grandeur of the male phallus and its idolization as a symbol of male strength and power. In the Bible, it dons the symbolism of all creation for its functionality and unique character, making it the tool of civilization. Oddly, within that burden rests a world unduly concerned with its exposure and exhibition, particularly in its moments of swollen pride reserved for times of sexual excitement. Contrast the phallus at rest when its devine power is merely imaginable for its capacity and what results is its fascinating dual nature, too often judged by its larger dimension. The tool through which the real "family jewels" are delivered to deposit nature's bounty have been unfairly criticized in our puritanical history. A similar problem occurs for female genitals creating the great shame that burdens society in its love/hate schizophrenic resolve in what attitudes are appropriate in any given situation of that primary focus. Misrepresented by advertisers, condemned by religious leaders, what is a male to do? The pride of ownership by both sexes might be the choice of response along with the tender care that any other physical organ deserves and is consistent with the mental health concerns we take with every other part of our bodies. Yet, the sensitive and private areas reserved for intimacies of enormous emotion and passion are often resigned to shameless hiding to survive where both men and women are conditioned to avoid or ignore these bodily parts so that both are unfamiliar with them throughout their lives. God given body parts that are integral to the sum total of our existence, including the ability to have children, are rarely the product of adults who have already had children for their value has been proven, and appreciation is accepted for its (or their) unique function. No need for shame. There is a need for understanding through the education that might be available to reach acceptance of these parts as no different from other organs of our bodies. Of greater sadness is the ridicule that is produced from the general and common functions these parts are meant to perform in our daily lives that ordinary, unthinking people consider gross. The unnatural contemplation and distain of the phallus, rooted in centuries of conflict, no doubt strives to live a normal life where its unique powers may be accepted and appreciated, and even proudly displayed in art, in sculpture, and when appropriate, in private. Overreaction of horror is unnatural for an educated society distorted by its taboos of shame. For God's finest glory designed for its distinct purpose, it is shameful treatment to condemn and irrationally hide God's artwork.

I found "The Phallus: Sacred Symbol of Male Creative Power" to be a fascinating book, not only with respect to Alain Daniélou's well-researched explanations of the purpose of phallic symbolism and worship, but also for his inclusion of ancient legends, beliefs, and cultural customs. With so much history and religio-cultural reasoning underlying phallic symbolism and worship, I'm personally amazed, as the author appears to be, that Western civilization, for the most part, considers this such a forbidden subject. In the introduction, the Author extends the amazement with the following caveat:

"Contempt for this sacred emblem, as well as degradation and debasement of it, pushes man from the divine reality. It provokes the anger of the gods and leads to the decline of the species. The man who scorns the very symbol of the life principle abandons his kind to the powers of death."

"The Phallus" is based on what I discovered to be an intriguing subject, and it is written with such clarity that I was easily drawn in, enlightened and entertained. Aside from its stimulating intellectual content, this book contains many beautiful photographs in both color and black and white.

A little boy had a set of tin soldiers that were made from a melted spoon. One soldier was missing a leg because there was not enough metal left over from the melted spoon.

Tossed aside by the boy, the one-legged soldier sees a paper cut out figure of a ballerina. She is poised on one leg and he feels an instant bond. He has found another one-legged toy and believes this to be love.

The steadfast tin soldier has a series of mishaps. He falls off the window sill into a stream. From there, he is transported to a rat infested sewer. He is swallowed by a fish and through an unlikely stroke of luck, winds up back in the boy's playroom with the other toys and the ballerina.

The ending is what gets to me every single time. A gust of wind lifts the paper ballerina up and she flutters into the fire place, winding up a charred heap of ashes. Devastated, the tin soldier joins her. The remaining metal that was once the tin soldier is a charred piece of heart shaped metal.

I still think this is a very sad story. The photographs really emphasize the feeling this story evokes.

I taught 1st grade for 4 years and all of the teachers in my grade passed this book around at Christmas to read to our class. I cried everytime I read it. It has a wonderful message and my kids in my classroom always loved it! I have now (finally) purchased my own copy of this book to read to my little girl. It is a classic and I know she will love it as much as I do. Every home should have this book to read at Christmastime.

This is a really good book. It has all the characteristic's that made the original a cherished and remembered fairy tale. It is a great gift for any young child, and can be enjoyed by adults too. It maintains the feel of the original tale, but is more like a poem. The art work on each page is beautiful, and the pictures are totally devine. I would recomend buying this for a different and fully enjoyable version of the original.

No entertainment assistant should be without the Gayot L.A. Restaurant guide. All of the assistants in my office use it and keep it on their desks. We refer to it as the "bible." On a daily basis, we need to come up with the best restaurants for important breakfasts and power lunches. A major part of my job is arranging such meals, and the Gayot guide always provides us with reliable suggestions. Everyone's satisfaction with the food, ambiance, and service at a restaurant I send them to is very important. Knowing that Gayot sends food critics to review each restaurant gives us all peace of mind - which is often hard to find in our busy work environment. We live by it, we swear by it, and we'd be at a loss without it!

I appreciate the frank and witty reviews in LA RESTAURANTS, and take comfort in knowing this is the only guidebook available that actually sends profesional critics in to review the food. Zagat is unreliable, relying only on questionnaires, to make their judgements on a restaurant. It has been proven to me on a number of occasions while using a Zagat guide that surveys don't take the place of a through review by a critic. I have been able to avoid paying lots of money on bad meals ever since I switched from Zagat and bought Gayot's LA RESTAURANTS. I keep a copy in my car, home, and office.

A complete and unbiased history of Alain Prost's racing career up to 1991 and some mention on his 1993 pre-season testing. Reports on Prost's 44 Grand Prix victories. (Prost added 7 to the record in 1993.) Here you can learn the story behind the scene of Prost's best win in Adelaide'86.

Christopher Hilton carefully selects the most important moments of Prost's karting, Formula Renault, F3 and F1 career, and completed this wonderful story by a great collection of interviewees' opinion on the Suzuka's incidents.

This biography shows how Alain Prost has developed himself into who he is, how he learnt from mistakes of himself and of others, why he refrained from going too fast in the wet, how he became mature and how he made himself a man true to his words. You may not be racing, but you can definitely benefit from this story of the most successful F1 driver ever.

PLease how much cost this book please send the price and available

The easy way with which the great French novelist leads the reader into a realistic mysterical world , can only be described as brilliant. The world of Meaulnes is magical, but not in the modern, cheapish, "Celestine" way. This is the quality of Alain-Fournier. Nature plays an important role in the story. The adventures of Meaulnes can not be seen apart from the beautiful woods that always surround him at his journeys. The story is told by a friend of the main character, Meaulnes.

Meaulnes tries desperately to find the girl he once saw at a medievalesque party in the middle of the forest, upon which he stumbled by coincidence. Alain Fournier manages to surround the two boys with a world that is as riddling and magical as it seems real and authentic. The quest of Meaulnes bears strong resemblances to Proust's "recherche", and is in fact a 20th century, personalized, search for the holy grail. That is not an easy theme for a first novel. As Alain-Fournier succeeded so wonderfully, one can only speculate what the world has missed - Alain-Fournier died at age 28, defending his fatherland France.

In Alain-Fournier's richly written but thinly veiled book of lost innocence we can find a connection to our own lives and mourn the loss of love and innocence that we have experienced along with the characters, all the while losing ourselves in the striking language of the book.

There are lots of good books about Art Deco as an overall art style but Patricia Kery seems to have corned the market with this title covering graphics. Large size, 320 pages and with 476 illustrations it will most likely be the standard reference for many years. The first chapter, 'Foundations of Art Deco graphic style' is a lucid explanation and the following chapters (printed on light mauve paper) expand on this excellent start. The illustrations are fortunately printed on glossy white paper.

Good as the book is though I was rather disappointed with the presentation. All of the spreads with several pictures have them deliberately unaligned and where there are only two images to a page they are usually the same size with a lot of white space and I mean a LOT. I think one of the images should have been big and the other smaller, thus reducing all the white space to a minimum. Typography on the mauve text pages is a mess, various sizes are used and the caption size is really too small. The left-hand page numbers are on the inside of the page next to the books spine, this seems a silly bit of designer whimsy.

The book is very comprehensive and rightly shows how the creative output of mostly European artists was used commercially. For an American perspective have a look at this beautifully designed paperback, 'Streamline: American Art Deco Graphic Design' by Steven Heller and Louise Fili. This has excellent illustrations showing how the style was adapted (those famous three speed lines) by American creative folk to sell products rather than a European fine art genre.

Art Deco Graphics is about graciousness of form. An unmatchable book that can be read five, ten times and still sift up new baubles. Brief-lived, yet timeless, like the then-young artists' cheerful way of navigating into the future using no compass or ancestral guidance. Like office girls who adored the little black dress, but were informed they could liquefy, rather than dump, themselves, into it, and so did.

The drifting directionlessness of France in the 1920s when film and poetry were all but the same thing, a nostalgia for what always is because it never was. It was time for something new.

New . . . and yet . . . more: Modern. Diverting. Striking, startling, disharmonious, direct. Everyone saw the need: Art of street to challenge art of salon. A merger between middle-class decorative taste and the revolutionary's love of the outré, the young artist's love of the avant-garde, the liberated career woman's preoccupation with the suave and the elegantly insolent. By the time the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes opened in Paris, the masters of modern art-Picasso, Braque, to skim for the moment the mythic cream, Klimt, Léger, Kandinsky, Magritte, Modigliani, Duchamp, Ernst, and Toulouse-Lautrec-had already transformed the fine arts. There seemed no new territory to explore.

Then the newbies discovered graphic arts.

There was no "Art Deco" then. Indeed, that appellation was not used until 1966. But artisans embracing a handful of ideas loosely bundled as "Style moderne" borrowed bits from Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Italian Futurism, the Vienna Secession, Bauhaus, then added techniques of their own: abstraction, distortion, oversimplification, geometric solidities reinforced with intense colors. They used these to celebrate the rise of commerce, technology, and (thanks to the auto and airplane) speed. The ensuing volcano spewed simultaneous views from several directions: hypercontrasts of color and arrangement, transformations of reality, personality, eccentricity.

These inspired a new kind of fine artist, the illustrator. Names like Cassandre, Jean Carlu, Herbert Bayer, and McKnight-Kauffer began to turn up not merely on posters, but magazine covers, stationery design, advertisements. A kumquat of Orientalism was squeezed out of Diaghilev's sensational Ballets Russes. American jazz, native American and African art, Egyptian glyphs, these too. And above all the discovery of personal power in the power of machines. All these contributed to an aesthetic confluence from which has flown the sociological art theme of our times: graphics, commerce, private purpose, public event, and social attitude are all immersed in one. Art Deco Graphics is like looking at the wedding pictures of one's grandparents.

Almost all these images are standouts, but a few are unsettling, and breathtakingly so. On page 89 is an ad for Herkules Bier "aus dem Hasenbrau-Augsburg." The sinister, leviathanic, muscle-bound, fist-clenched figure uses one of the hallmarks of Art Deco-deep shadow to enhance contrast-to convey a message as self-contradictory as it is threatening: Drink this and it won't go to your belly, it will build the muscle of Germany. Rage is power,too.

That was 1925. Five years earlier Ludwig Hohlwein design an ad "Tachometerwerke" for a Düsseldorf maker of the eponymous instruments to clock engine revs. The vehicle, with its riveted sheet metal body and upjutting phallic levers for gears and brakes, all done in a dark drab befitting military maneuvers in the slime, is not a Gay Paree streamlined beauty with chauffeur and mink-trimmed consort. It is a tank. The vehicle alone says, "We're coming, out of the way." But it is the driver who truly frightens. Garbed in the thick leathers of automobiling at the time, gloved hands gripping-no, choking-the wheel, his face is of such grim, hating, enraged determination that one cannot think of similar malevolency in all of art history except perhaps for Meiji-era Japanese prints extolling the glories of battle. Even in 1920 the omens were shrieking, and by 1925 they were building muscle.

Yet for the most part Art Deco was sweetness and elegance, if not light, and a kind of innocence during the days when modern commercialism was being established. One can see editors exploiting inner fears on behalf of ad sales even then: the Vogue and Vanity Fair covers depict improbably slender women draped in the silks and furs of unattainable wealth, their eyes of steel willing and able to stare down an amorous tycoon (page 143). Book publishers were right alongside them: A book cover by a designer pseudonymed "Fish" (in reality the British caracaturist Ann Sefton) proclaimed, "High Society-Hints on how to Attain, Relish - and Survive It; A Pictorial Guide to Life in Our Upper Circles." Powerful "Fortune" covers (whose ultra-simplicity and unusual view angles could inspire cinema students even today). They also were the days when "Fortune" had taste: A 1941 cover was graced with a Fernand Léger graphic.

This book is very convenient for hand surgeons to advance their abilities.

Outstanding atlas to complement a comprehensive text. Superior illustrations and useful descriptions of common procedures.

I don't understand French but I bought this book for the pictures and the topic. I had the good fortune to have visited the Maginot Line near Longuyon and wanted a picture book as a souvenir. This book surpasses my expectations and the lavish presentation and format sets new standards on presenting a little known topic.

Excellent book which is well illustrated and presents an interesting view of the planning and construction of the ouvrages (forts) of the Maginot Line. The authors provide data along with the most comprehensive view yet of the troops that served in the Maginot Line in northeast France. Virtually every regiment, most of them RIF (Fortress Infantry Regiments) are included in the descriptions along with details on the uniforms and insigna worn. A knowledge of French is not really needed to enjoy this book, although a good dictionary might be useful. If you are reading this you can also use one of the many translation sites on the web to help you through the book. This is presently one of the best illustrated books available on the Maginot Line in the U.S. This is volume 1 of a 4 volume series. The second book will cover the the armament used and the third will deal with the short combat history of the Maginot Line. The final book will be devoted to the Little Maginot Line in the southeast on the Alpine front with Italy. Best of all, the price of this book is relatively modest considering its size and the number of illustrations (182 pages with from 1 to 4 illustrations or charts on almost every page).

This is a very interesting portrait of a much abused genre. The essays a quite wonderful, with the essay on Polanski's Repulsion worth the price of the book alone.

I discovered many movies from reading this book, and I am still on the hunt for some of them. But the hunt is a pleasure.

HORROR FILM READER is an extensive collection of articles and essays combined to further our understanding of horror film's allure and impact upon the viewer. Divided into two sections, the first contains early works dating from 1952 up through 1975 while the second half delves into the more current arguments to date.

Part One: Seminal Essays contains:

"Ghoulies and Ghosties" by Curtis Harrington (1952)

"Horror Films" by William K. Everson (1954)

"The Subconscious: From Pleasure Castle to Libido Hotel" by Raymond Durgnat (1958)

"The Face of Horror" by Derek Hill (1958)

"A Bloody New Wave in the United States" by Jean-Claude Romer (1964)

"Horror Is My Business" by Terence Fisher (1964)

"The Horror Film: Polanski and REPULSION" by Ivan Butler (1967)

"From Voyeurism to Infinity" by Raymond Lefevre (1968)

"Mario Bava: the Illusion of Reality" by Alain Silver and James Ursini (1975)

Part Two: New Perspectives contains:

"Neglected Nightmares" by Robin Wood (1980)

"Is the Devil American? William Dieterle's THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER" by Tony Williams (1999)

"Violence, Women, and Disability in Tod Brownings's FREAKS and THE DEVIL DOLL" by Martin F. Norden and Madeleine Cahill (1998)

"Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror" by Steven Schneider (1997)

"The Anxiety of Influence: George Franju and the Medical Horror Shows of Jess Franco" by Joan Hawkins (1999)

"Seducing the Subject: Freddy Krueger" by Ian Conrich (1997)

"What Rough Beast? Insect Politics and THE FLY" by Linda Brookover and Alain Silver (1999)

"Demon Daddies: Gender, Ecstasy and Terror in the Possession Film" by Tanya Krzywinska (1999)

"Women on the Verge of a Gothic Breakdown: Sex, Drugs and Corpses in THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK" by Glenn Erickson (1997)

"CANDYMAN: Urban Space, Fear, and Entitlement" by Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai (1996)

"THE HAUNTING and the Power of Suggestion: Why Robert Wise's Film Continues to "Deliver the Goods" to Modern Audiences" by Pam Keesey (1999)

There is too much between the covers of this Silver-Ursini collection to pass up. Not every article takes a fresh stance, but there are a number of moments when you may just say, "Gee, I hadn't thought of that." Also, on a comparative level, this collection's variety of perspectives lends a chance to juggle different views without the clutter of film books, journals, and magazines that would otherwise be needed.

This one is worth the buy.

I can't express how exquisitely these 4 volumes are packaged. Take a look at the price!!! There is a large case that contains four slender volumes bound in what appears to be handmade paper. Each volume focuses on one of four palaces. Each one contains watercolours with a description paragraph to the left. The watercolours are breathtakingly reproduced -- bright colors, intricate details. Treat yourself to these four, perhaps the most beautiful book ever produce on the subject of Imperial Russia. Go ahead and splurge!

These four volumes are a wonfderful collectionof watercolours and grisailles from the times of Imperial Russia. They would be suitable for anyone with an interestin art, architecture, Russia and St Petersburg. They show the four palaces (sadly there is no volume for other palaces such as Ropsha, Strelna or Oranienbaum) as they were before they were destroyed by the Germans in WWII. The palaces (both interiors and exteriors) as well as their gardens are brought to life by this wonderful collection. They are shown as they exisited throughout the 19th century and are interesting not only for their artistic and architectual merits but also for their intrinsic historic and cultural value. Very strongle recommended.