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| Reference | Author Title Publisher | Summary | ||
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Sami A. Aldeeb |
A revised English translation of the book in two volumes published in Arabic by Riad El-Rayyes in Beirut and prefaced by Dr. Nawal Al-Saadawi. It is also available in French, published by L'Harmattan. Orders are accepted from the publisher, Shangri-La Publications by email: | Sami Aldeeb | In Arabic You can see an English translation of the foreword by Dr. Nawal El-Saadawi. |
Un livre par | En français Il peut être ordonné par internet ou email. |
Bud Berkeley, | A loosely organised compendium of history, first person accounts and photographs, of both the foreskin and circumcision, more suited to the person with a sexual interest in one or the other. Out of print in April 2000, but you can try for Foreskin: A Closer Look at Amazon.com | |||
Jim Bigelow & James L. Snyder, |
This book goes far beyond its short title; it is a comprehensive review of circumcision and the case against it.  Read reviews and order second-hand copies of "The Joy of Uncircumcising", amended in the light of recent developments, is now available on paper, on CD, or as an eBook from the NORM website. |
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Lisa Bisque, | One woman's investigation of the effect of circumcision on sexuality.  Read reviews and order | |||
Billy Ray Boyd, | An excellent short summary, with a sensitive treatment of Brit Milah and appropriate first-person involvement.  Read reviews and order Or more directly using PayPal from the book's own website. | |||
Sherwin Carlquist |
It is hard to say anything about "Uncut" that it has not already said about itself. From the dustjacket:
$25 ppd. Send check payable to Sherwin Carlquist to Pinecone Press, 4539 Via Huerto, Santa Barbara, CA 93110. The same author has published a series of albums of "Natural Men" - not only intact but without piercings, tattoos, tanlines or shaved bodies. | |||
Shaye J. D. Cohen, | Cohen is a Jewish Studies professor at Harvard, a specialist in rabbinic studies. He has a beginner's knowledge of the arguments against circumcision. but gives them only guarded recognition. He concludes with a vaguely worded defense that slides past the central issue of whether anyone has the right to do this to an infant. His essential answer to the question in the title comes on p. 111, beginning of Part 2, where he discusses four "responses," the first being most important: "Why do Jewish men bear a covenantal mark on their bodies but not Jewish women? The fundamental answer . . . is that the Jewishness of women is different from the Jewishness of men, or, to be more blunt, the Jewishness of women is of a lesser kind than the Jewishness of men. The absence of circumcision bespeaks their second-tier status. This is the answer that I have been calling the implicit answer of rabbinic Judaism . . . What was implicit for [the earlier rabbis] became explicit in the thirteenth century." Jewish women especially may wish to consider the implications of that. | |||
Robert Darby, |
In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors urged parents to circumcise their sons as a routine precaution against every imaginable sexual dysfunction, from syphilis and phimosis to masturbation and bed-wetting. Thirty years later the procedure again came under hostile scrutiny, culminating in its disappearance during the 1960s. Why Britain adopted a practice it had traditionally abhorred and then abandoned it after only two generations is the subject of A Surgical Temptation. Robert Darby reveals that circumcision has always been related to the question of how to control male sexuality. This study explores the process by which the male genitals, and the foreskin especially, were pathologized, while offering glimpses into the lives of such figures as James Boswell, John Maynard Keynes, and W. H. Auden. Examining the development of knowledge about genital anatomy, concepts of health, sexual morality, the rise of the medical profession, and the nature of disease, Darby shows how these factors transformed attitudes toward the male body and its management and played a vital role in the emergence of modern medicine. 
Read reviews and order | Leonard Glick, |  Leonard Glick This important book traces the history of circumcision from the ancient Middle East to the modern US and its transformation, from a blood ritual to a surgical procedure with extraordinary cultural power, weaving history and analysis together in a very readable way. You can hear an interview with Dr. Glick from Station WFCR by clicking the MP3 button here.
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Ronald Goldman, |
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Ronald Goldman, | As the title implies, this thoughtfully argues the case for a Brit without Milah. Recommended by five rabbis.
Read reviews and order | |||
David L. Gollaher, |
This ground-breaking book attempts to explain the worldwide obsession with circumcising, and puts the current US medical preoccupation into that context.
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Ellen Gruenbaum | For better understanding of the obstacles of opposing FGM & MGM, and for implicit suggestions on how to use careful strategy rather than head-on confrontation. Gruenbaum worked in Sudan, now teaches at California State University, Fresno.
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Frederick M. Hodges and Paul M. Fleiss M.D. | "Packed with sensible information, practical solutions that work, and landmark information on male health and child care...an indispensible guide for parents" - Dr Dean Edell
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Lawrence A. Hoffman, | This book traces Jewish doubts about circumcision over the last 150 years, and the progressive separation of women from the rite over centuries. The writer himself does not take a stand, at least in part because he is part of the system he is trying to analyse. | |||
Joseph Lewis | Perhaps the first book ever to challenge routine infant circumcision. Long out of print and hard to get hold of, it is highly regarded by some of those who have read it, criticised as anti-Semitic by others. | |||
Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, |
 Hanny Lightfoot-Klein Primarily about FGM, but has a chapter on male circumcision. |
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Kristen O'Hara with Jeffrey O'Hara |
Largely based on the O'Haras' survey of women who have had sex with both intact and circumcised men, it argues in favour of the intact penis as enhancing women's sexual pleasure (as well as the man's). The book's webpage offers extensive summaries.
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Thomas J. Ritter |
Read reviews and order Say No to Circumcision from Amazon.com Updated and revised by George C. Denniston, MD and reissued as Doctors Re-examine Circumcision. Now includes the most recent research, data, terminology, and medical-association position-statements available about infant circumcision. Case of 66 books ($4 per book) = $289
All prices include shipping to a single address in the US. Orders to outside the US will have different shipping charges. All the proceeds from the sale of this book will be used for circumcision education and outreach
programs. Order via email to MusiciansUnited@aol.com or send a cheque or money order, made payable to NOCIRC-PA, to |
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Patricia Robinett, |  Patricia Robinett The
story of how one woman discovered
she had been the victim of female
genital mutilation as a child in Kansas. Deals with both the female and male operations. | |||
Rosemary Romberg, | An excellent overview of most aspects of circumcision. The author had her three sons circumcised before beginning to doubt the procedure. Extremely moderate, and more convincing for that reason. | |||
Carl Schutt, | A quirky work: a poem for expectant parents presented in images worked in paper-sculpture.
The author sings it on VideoGoogle. Available from http://www.iwantmyforeskinforgiftmas.com/mainsiteflash.html | |||
Eric Silverman, | From the publisher: "...a comprehensive overview of Jewish circumcision throughout history. Beginning with Genesis, the author traces paradoxes and tensions in biblical-Jewish circumcision as seen both within Judaism and from the dominant, non-Jewish culture, and ends with the current debate over Jewish and routine medical circumcision in America." From the author: "... while I did, in the spirit of intellectual honestly, critique many anti-circumcision arguments, especially the rather disturbing images of Jews, I also critique the pro-circumcision arguments. I endorse no position." | |||
Edward Wallerstein, | First general condemnation of Routine Infant Circumcision |
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| Reference | Author Title Publisher | Summary | ||
Shalom Auslander | "Thousands of years ago, a terrified, half-mad old man genitally mutilated his son, hoping it would buy him some points with the Being he hoped was running the show. Over the years, equally terrified men wrote blessings and composed prayers and devised rituals and ordained that an empty seat be left for Elijah. Six thousand years later, a father will not look his grandson in the face, and a mother and sister will defend such behavior, because the child wasn't mutilitated in precisely the right fashion." Memoir of (partially) escaping from a highly Orthodox Jewish family and community. From a review:"His father was belligerent and volatile and given to threats involving amputation." From an interview: "[Deciding whether to circumcise my son] was incredibly difficult and it was at that point, or afterwards that I realised that's really what the book was about. ... I was enraged that when a nurse turned to me, and said "This is- it's a boy" it turned my life upside down. ... what my mind became increadibly occupied with was, "Do I mutilate this kid or don't I?" ... Ah, I think it's very funny (laughs) that talking about my son's willy ruins the book. (Laughs) So, his name is Pax and if you're listening to this in 20 years, apologies ahead of time, but um, ... our son had a very difficult time getting into this world, and without going into too many details I was afraid that God might make it very easy for him to leave, and it was right after that, ... that a doctor came in and asked us if we were going to circumcise and, and we looked at each other and my wife shrugged and I shrugged and then I thought, "I'm not messing around with this guy right now." There's this tiny little boy hooked up to a bunch of tubes, and I said "Yeah. We will." And I mention in the book that next day, a few hours after that, I think it was the next day, they came and they took his little sealed cart that he was in and rolled him down the hall, and did it, and I couldn't watch. I walked out, and heard him screaming and, I say in the book that the moment my son became a Jew was the moment I felt least like one." [Surgical circumcision in a hospital on an unspecified day by an unknown doctor without ritual has nothing to do with being a Jew, let alone becoming one.]
Foreskin's Lament is also the title of a 1981 New Zealand play. | |||
Joseph Cohen | A thin, jokey book of penis-lore (such as Penis Day). One page of the two-page "Great Circumcision Debate" is a picture of a butcher with a chopper and a string of sausages. Both sides get exactly equal space, fewer than 100 words each. (No room to rebut circumcisionist claims or mention human rights.) Though there are good photos of intact penises, some key diagrams are not. The text mentions common and medical terms from 'bladder' to 'corpus spongiosum' - but neither 'foreskin' nor 'prepuce'. It attributes sensitivity to the frenulum (a common displacement when that is all that is left of the ridged band) and says the most dense concentration of nerves is in the testicles! (Possibly assumed from the acute pain caused by a kick to them, but there is more to nerves than pain.)
Don't confuse it with The Penis Book: an owner's manual by Margaret Gore or The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley. | |||
AGM Campbell and N McIntosh (eds) | "Routine circumcision of the newborn as commonly practiced in the USA is to be condemned, the incidence of complications, including death, far outweighing the supposed advantage of avoiding such problems as carcinoma of the penis. ... The fact that it is 'more hygienic' is often used as an excuse for circumcision but one does not chop off the ears to save washing them, or the feet because they may smell!... The only valid [reason] is a fibrous phimosis. This may be due to inappropriate attempts at retraction at an early age, causing splitting and scarring of the preputial meatus ... Circumcision is thus performed either for religious or tribal reasons, for fibrous phimosis or, perhaps most frequently, for remuneration!" | |||
Ayun Halliday | A first-person account of childbirth and rearing includes a chapter divided three ways between the son's intactness, the daughter's (born with a third thumb) and the decision whether to declaw the cat. | |||
Christopher Hitchins, |
"In more recent times, some pseudosecular arguments have been adduced for
male circumcision. ... Full excision, originally ordered by god as
the blood price for the promised future massacre of the Canaanites, is now
exposed for what it is - a mutilation of a powerless infant with the aim
of ruining its future sex life. The connection between religious barbarism
and sexual repression could not be plainer than when it is ˜marked in
your flesh." Who can count the number of lives that have been made
miserable in this way, especially since Christian doctors began to adopt
ancient Jewish folklore in their hospitals? ... If religion
and its arrogance were not involved, no healthy society would permit this
primitive amputation, nor allow any surgery to be practiced on the
genitalia without the full and informed consent of the person concerned." | |||
Dr. Terri Hamilton
| Emphasises the important structure and role of the foreskin. Has a chapter on circumcision. Does not mention the ridged band, however.
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Steve Jones, | In a sometimes irritating journalistic style, eleven pages of a chapter, "Man Mutilated" unequivocally condemn circumcision. Coverage is wide-ranging but sketchy, and some information is out of date or inaccurate, | |||
Russ Kick (ed.), | In it there is a chapter by Diane Petryk-Bloom on "Circumcision and Sex" which is the most devastating critique of circumcision, about how it damages sexual pleasure The price is $24.95 and it is a paperbound large type. | |||
Sheila Kitzinger, | Succinctly and unequivocally condemns circumcision. At least the UK edition, published by Dorling Kindersley, does.
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Lynda Madaras |
This book, aimed at 9-12 year olds, is particularly suited to intact boys. | |||
Rosiland Miles | A study of the roots of male violence. Several passages touch on circumcision, but she seems unaware of the frequency of Routine Infant Circumcision in the US. | |||
| Morris | Desmond Morris, | A chapter "Why are babies circumcised?" is a 2½ page attack on the practice. Has a light touch: "[Circumcision] has been said to be valuable because ...The Devil hides beneath the foreskin, ... The truth ...is... Those who believe in the Devil know perfectly well that he can enter the body through any unprotected orifice, which makes the circumcised individual more vulnerable than the uncircumcised." Considers the foreskin only as protective of the glans, however, not as erogenous in its own right, saying that circumcision "has no effect, one way or the other, on the sexual performance of the adult male" - presumably following Masters and Johnson.
| Desmond Morris, | Three pages strongly condemn all genital mutilation and attempt to explain it. Nearly half a page about foreskin restoration. |
Sarah Simblet | Unlike most anatomy books, includes a section on the genitals, with four photographs of different lengths of foreskin and one of a circumcised penis. [at least the British edition does....]
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Margaret Somerville | Margaret Somerville is the first academic ethicist to question the ethics of neonatal circumcision. Her book has a chapter on circumcision called "Altering Baby Boys' Bodies: The Ethics of Infant Male Circumcision" (pp. 202-219).
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Photographs of natural (intact, untattooed, undepilated, without tanlines) male nudes in natural surroundings | Natural Man (1991) |
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Man Naturally (1996) |
 Read reviews and order Man Naturally from Amazon.com or go to Sherwin Carlquist's website as above. |
The Natural Male (1999) |
 Read reviews and order The Natural Male from Amazon.com or go to Sherwin Carlquist's website. as above. |
Forthcoming: The Nature/Man Panels - mid-2002 or earlier. | See also "Uncut: the natural history of the foreskin" |
| Reference | Author Title Publisher | Summary | ||
Lori B. Andrews and Dorothy Nelkin |
Although it conspicuously fails to mention the trade in foreskins, it has a wealth of information about the ethics and legality of the trade in body parts. | |||
Patrick Barbier
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Castration of boys to keep their high singing voices throughout manhood (and for familiar "medical reasons") was as acceptable in 18th and 19th Century Italy as circumcision is in the US today.
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Alice Dreger, | From a review by Georganne Chapin: ... Dreger concludes that children who are born attached are generally not just accepting of, but happy with their lives. ... Rather, it is the medical establishment that rushes to intervene, capitalizing on the drama of the event and parents' understandable confusion and lack of a roadmap for navigating the unexpected. ... Dreger shows that with the exception of emergencies, separation surgeries are often not medically necessary procedures, and often do nothing to improve the physical health or function of either child. “In fact, they often leave the children's bodies - at least temporarily and often permanently - much more ill and impaired than before ….” Related to this is “anxiety about conjoined children's future sexuality.” ...Dreger notes that, as is true generally of pediatric surgeries performed in the United States, virtually no information is available as to the actual results of separation surgeries... ...one cannot miss the point that the bioethical issues are the same, whether dealing with extremely rare phenomena such as conjoined twins or a condition that afflicts just about half of all people on earth - possession of a penile prepuce at birth."
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Ian Hacking | Includes a valuable warning about the misuse of statistics, as commonly done in studies claiming to prove links between intactness and various diseases.
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Lyall Watson | Jacobson's organ, like the foreskin, has been commonly removed in the false belief that it has no function.
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Circumcision in fiction.
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