Maggie Paley mentions fairly early on in the imaginatively titled The Book Of The Penis that the John Wayne Bobbitt debacle afforded everyday Americans the opportunity to toss around the word "penis" with relative impunity for the first time. Paley never mentions the Clinton-Lewinsky affair by name in her thin, dilettantish tome, but it is perhaps advantageous to her that her book should come out following a scandal that made a good number of folks examine the role of the most widely recognized male sex organ as it relates to their endeavors. In her introduction, Paley admits that her book is far from the last word on its subject and, true to her word, The Book Of The Penis is in no way authoritative, less a cohesive work than a ramshackle collection that at times recalls a harmlessly smutty research project, a fuzzy sociological treatise, and an unusually long article for a women's magazine. In the spirit of all good newshounds, Paley resolves to get to the bottom of the whole penis thing, interviewing transsexuals and sex-trade workers and even going so far as to view all of three porn films, each of which she dutifully summarizes. Gathering insight on the role of the penis from the aforementioned places, as well as numerous anonymous sources and a friend named Enrique—who is apparently some sort of penis expert by virtue of his vaguely exotic-sounding name—Paley periodically stumbles across an interesting observation or a profound insight, but frequently abandons those intriguing ideas in favor of the sort of mild, impatient curiosity you'd expect to find in the work of an enterprising amateur journalist. The Book Of The Penis is never unreadable, but those looking for profound insight into the male psyche or the male sex drive ought to look elsewhere.