Setting out to "make intellectual and emotional sense of a man's relationship with his defining organ," David Friedman moves from highbrow to lowbrow in this lighthearted but substantive cultural history. Successively viewed as a life source, a symbol of a sacred covenant with God, an emblem of shame, an instrument of domination, a mere prop for the pharmaceutical companies, and finally, as simply a means of penetration-the penis has always been at the core of Western man's (and woman's) cultural evolution. With such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Walt Whitman, and Norman Mailer marking their territory on the subject, A Mind of Its Own is an intelligent and often hilarious account of man's complicated bond with his closest friend....

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His historic career as an aviator made Charles Lindbergh one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best-selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step—the Lindy Hop—that he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. This oddest of couples—one a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies—joined forces in 1930 driven by a shared and secret dream: to conquer death and attain immortality.

Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Madman, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement and equally large character flaws challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences—personal, professional, and political—that neither man anticipated.

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