From Publishers Weekly
Alternately called "adventure magazines" and "armpit slicks," publications like True West, American Manhood and Challenge for Men enjoyed their heyday from the early 1950s through the early '70s. With their campy cover paintings of men at war, hunks on horseback and buxom women, these magazines gave blue collar workers "warnings, how-to's, and comforting memories of wartime." For Parfrey, they're worth looking at today because "they tell us so much about American working-class fears, desires and wet dreams." Parfrey intersperses this collection of full-color reproductions with essays by contributors on subjects ranging from exotica and "the sadistic burlesque" to the Cold War. The essays will be helpful to readers trying to make sense out of such images as UFOs closing their clamp-like hands around fretting females with their shirts unbuttoned (from Peril: The All Man's Magazine), and a burly, shirtless man straddling a flagpole flying a torn American flag (from Climax: Exciting Stories for Men).Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Carlo McCormick, Senior Editor, Paper
...stunning historical evidence of the convoluted sexuality lurking in our epic archetype of the Real, True and All Man.


Robert Williams
...(Feral House has) brought the socially incompatible flotsam back to us in a wonderful book, IT'S A MAN'S WORLD.


Book Description
Men’s magazines first appeared in great numbers after World War II and the Korean War. Their signature stories, supposedly based on reality, often depicted brawny he-men protecting lustful women from savages, Nazis, Koreans, or Cubans. It’s a Man’s World explores a time when magazines like Argosy and True flourished, along with their more sexually charged counterparts such as Stag and For Men Only. The book is both an art gallery and a lively history, profiling the magazines’ themes of bondage and S/M, racism, and sexism. Editor Adam Parfrey provides sociological context for the extraordinary covers, interior art, and articles in these cultural artifacts. Extensively illustrated with reproductions from magazines like Saga, Stag, and more, this is a colorful and lively retrospective of masculinity in the cold-war era.


From the Inside Flap
Man's Exploits, Rage, Escape to Adventure -- these were a few of the 35-cent magazines that helped veterans confront the confusion of jobs, girls and the Cold War after coming home from World War II. IT'S A MAN'S WORLD looks back at the last great run of pop illustration, at least as brilliant as pulp's best. Contributions from Bruce Jay Friedman, Josh Alan Friedman and David Saunders help bring us inside the offices, showing us how the writers, illustrators, editors and publishers put together two decades of "armpit slicks." Original art from the notorious Mort Künstler, Norman Saunders and Norm Eastman are featured within, and Bill Devine's annotated checklist of the many thousands of adventure magazines is essential for collectors of the genre. Author Adam Parfrey is the editor of EXTREME ISLAM, APOCALYPSE CULTURE II and the co-author of LEXICON DEVIL: THE FAST TIMES AND SHORT LIFE OF DARBY CRASH AND THE GERMS.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Man's Exploits, Rage, Escape to Adventure -- these were a few of the 35 cent magazines that helped veterans confront the confusion of jobs, girls and the Cold War after coming home from World War II. It's a Man's World looks back at the last great run of pop illustration, at least as brilliant as pulp's best. Contributions from Bruce Jay Friedman, Josh Alan Friedman and David Saunders help bring us inside the offices, showing us how the writers, illustrators, editors and publishers put together two decades of "armpit slicks." Original art from the notorious Mort Kunstler, Norman Saunders and Norm Eastman are featured within, and Bill Devine's annotated checklist of the many thousands of adventure magazines is essential for collectors of the genre.

FROM THE CRITICS

Carlo McCormick - Senior Editor, PAPER

For all its claims to normalcy, there is something ineffably perverse about 'straight' America. As pulp and noir vernaculars reveal the obsessions and fetishes in our culture of repression, IT'S A MAN'S WORLD lays out the aesthetic topography of the Erotic Other as a surrogate for our own thwarted desires. Here is stunning historical evidence of the convoluted sexuality lurking in our epic archetype of the Real, True and All Man.

The Los Angeles Times

For many decades now, popular and political culture has promoted a fantasy of the 1950s as a long idyllic moment when family life, gender roles and moral values were fixed in utopian perfection. Yet it is clear from the subliterature surveyed by It's a Man's World that at least half the gender equation was deeply troubled by the restraints of domestic life and felt most energized and fully alive imagining situations of mortal peril and physical combat, ones that included supine and often half-dead female bodies in urgent need of rescue or whip-wielding vixens to be overpowered and tamed. A restive, neurotic quality slips into the mix in publications like Dare, Exposed, Crime Confessions and the like, in which the men's adventure sensibility is brought to bear on contemporary life in America. The same tropes of deadly exotic menace, applied to the landscape of middle-class domesticity, reveal the social schizophrenia of an idealized era. — Gary Indiana

Publishers Weekly

Alternately called "adventure magazines" and "armpit slicks," publications like True West, American Manhood and Challenge for Men enjoyed their heyday from the early 1950s through the early '70s. With their campy cover paintings of men at war, hunks on horseback and buxom women, these magazines gave blue collar workers "warnings, how-to's, and comforting memories of wartime." For Parfrey, they're worth looking at today because "they tell us so much about American working-class fears, desires and wet dreams." Parfrey intersperses this collection of full-color reproductions with essays by contributors on subjects ranging from exotica and "the sadistic burlesque" to the Cold War. The essays will be helpful to readers trying to make sense out of such images as UFOs closing their clamp-like hands around fretting females with their shirts unbuttoned (from Peril: The All Man's Magazine), and a burly, shirtless man straddling a flagpole flying a torn American flag (from Climax: Exciting Stories for Men). (Aug. 15) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal