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Men's Adventure Magazines: In Postwar America |
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| Author: Rich Oberg Published: 2008-04-01 |
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List price: $14.99 Our price: $10.19 |
Usually ships in 24 hours As of: January 07th, 2009 06:01:30 PM |
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Customer comments on this selection. Take me back to the barbershop.I was a child in the fifties. Every other week, my father and I would make the Saturday trek to the barbershop where I got a cleanup on my flattop. Barbershops were a male thorugh and through. The testoserone was thick. All conversation was sports, politics and juicy dirty jokes. A true introduction to adulthood for a young impressionable boy. The best part was the stack of magazines. Men's magazines. Magazines I had never seen before with stories about faraway places and exotic adventure. Not to mention the girlie pictures. This book brings it all back. Once again I was twelve, turning pages and reading stories that made me look at my father in a whole new way. Wow, was it great to be a man or what? Man's Adventure focuses on the cover art of these great mags. Pity they didn't spend a few pages on the articles and the advertising. Thanks Taschen for the mind trip, it was a great time to be a boy. men's adventureDefinitely worth buying if you are interested in pulp art. Its great that under each cover it gives the date of issue and the name of the artist. This book really overloads the senses. Wonderful stuff.  It's Like a Miniature Museum of Manliness!Appearantly Taschen publishes art books. I wasn't familiar with this particular company before recieving this book as a gift, but I found it to be a great little book of... well pulp men's magazine art from the old days. You know, the type where some adventuring Indiana Jones-esque pulp hero gets lost in some exotic locale, fights savage beasts and makes out with sexy native girls. Culled from the covers of mags with titles like 'Man's Life, 'True Danger,' and 'Wildcat Adventures,' this little book is loaded with page after full colour page of muscle bound explorers, soldiers and cowboys going head to head with man-eating tigers and giant octopi, heroically battling the Nazis and Commies alike, and rescuing sexy, overly well endowed (and scantily clad) Polynesian girls from danger! What's that you say? Sounds like it might be a little... two dimensional? Sexist? Offensive to today's sensibilities? Oh yeah, you bet... and then some! But that's part of the fun, really. These overly testosterone fueled manly fantasies were part of another era, and a fascinating one to look at at that! Besides... what man (or boy) doesn't like this sort of stuff deep down inside? It's shades of Kipling meets the Magnificent Seven and Dirty Harry mixed with D-Day, crammed with more cheap thrills, bloody violence and hot sweaty sex than you can shake a stick at! And it's all so over the top. I mean, who thinks of titles like "Those Slimy Rodents Are Eating My Flesh," "Terror in the Far East: The Wolf-Women of India," or "Aphrodisiac Scandal of the Sex Mad Intermns and the 63 Passionate Student Nurses"? Divided up into chapters based around common themes such as wild animal attacks (which include everything from panthers to enraged bull elephants to inexplicably flesh-eating swarms of iguanas and flying squirrels!), World War II, pirate adventures and "the Yellow Peril," each chapter includes a brief article (again based on the chapter's theme) in English, French and German. This is nice not only because it provides some idea of context (for instance, Tahitian and Samoan sexuality became a popular subject due to the popularity of Mead's writings), but also because of the descriptions of the stories... which pretty much match what you'd expect from the covers. Like an Old West full of American Indians kidnapping white women, voluptuous hookers/spies fighting against the Nazis, and man-eating anteaters! Again, pretty un-PC stuff, but thats par for the course. The book also includes an introduction, explaining the background, development and eventual falling out of the manly, hair-on-your-chest pulp adventure magazines. All in all, it turns out to be quite a fun and entertaining romp through the testosterone fueled, hyper-masculine adventure stories of a bygone era. Sure, it's easy to laugh at them, or get offended at the racial (sexual, political, etc) caricatures that they presented. But really, these should be appreciated for providing us with some insight into the psyches of those who read and created these works. And, as my cousin was quick to point out, these magazines were so great! I mean really, what little boy didn't want to be a cowboy, go on safari to Africa, or fight enemy soldiers on the battlefield? So much nostalgia there really... And who could resist a book that says "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" on the back cover? Come on... that ALONE should be enough to make you want to flip through it. Weasels Ripped my Flesh!While I agree with other reviewers that Feral House's "It's A Man's World" is a vastly superior book, This is still a nice collection of images for the purveyor of unique Americana. I collect these insane artifacts and there just can't possibly be enough books published on the subject. SO BUY 'EM ALL! The "normal" Pulps have ignored and hidden away their retarded younger brother for too long. It's time to let him out of the cellar. Try to find a book on the history of "The Pulps" that admits these lurid items were the final incarnation of the format! YOU CAN'T! All those authors are ashamed to admit the legacy that fostered The Shadow, Tarzan and Conan ended brutally with the Men's Adventure Magazines. Now the truth is out. YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH! Anyway, buy Feral House's book first, then buy this one too. It makes a decent addendum to the Feral House book. You can never have too much lurid art to amaze your friends with... Like all Taschen books, a beautyThis book was a trip down memory lane for me; I got a kick out those lurid men's-magazine covers in my youth, and today I get... well, a surge of nostalgia, if no longer quite the same charge. The volume is beautifully produced, like all Taschen books, though I have to add that I find it no better than a similar compendium of men's-mag art called IT'S A MAN'S WORLD, which came out six months earlier; and IAMW, it should be said, has a more extensive and entertaining text. |
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