 Largely a history of American men's magazines, beginning in the 1950s with Hugh Hefner and "Playboy" and winding its way through the 1960s and 1970s following Hefner's less genteel proegeny, "Hustler" publisher Larry Flynt, "Penthouse" publisher Bob Guccione, and "Screw" founder Al Goldstein, the book covers approximately sixty years of American popular culture and free speech as "viewed from the darkside of the newsstand.