The Rear View: A Brief and Elegant History of Bottoms Through the Ages

by Jean-Luc Hennig and Jean-Luc Henning

Book Overview

Witty, cultured, provocative, and shamelessly enjoyable, The Rear View is a celebration of the behind, ranging from its physical evolution to its history as a source of artistic and literary inspiration and as a barometer of social attitudes. The ancient Greeks revered the buttocks as being an aspect of the divine and portrayed them enthusiastically on marble statuary. With the Christian era, however, depiction of the nude figure sank into shameful...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517708140
• ISBN13: 9780517708149
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 181 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

One picture, and one tail, are worth a thousand words.

This is another boonie dog book review from Wolfie and Kansas. Jean-Luc Hennig's book "The Rear View" is a collection of essays and vignettes about the human backside. "The Rear View" may be the best book of this subject since J.F. Federspiel's novel "Laura's Skin". However, while "The Rear View" is often cute and clever, it has two major faults.First, this book reads as if Hennig had written the text for a coffee-table book (albeit one to be placed on coffee tables in high-class bordellos), only to have an editor remove most of the pictures at the last minute to keep the price down. Much of the book discusses notable paintings and photographs of human buttocks, but since the pictures are not reproduced, it is sometimes hard to make sense of the text. The book's handful of black-and-white pictures is not adequate to illustrate the many points which Mr. Hennig seeks to make.This book also devotes nothing more than a passing mention to the major inadequacy of human hindquarters--the absence of a tail. Doubtlessly the human practice of bobbing the tails of some dogs is just a vengeful and violent expression of human tail envy. One reason that humans talk so much is that you must chatter endlessly to convey emotions that we dogs can express with a simple wag