note .. have not gone further into this story of the "forskin lament " a comparisson ofr the dogma of jewish as well as catholic to the human reality.
One of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year Paperback in stores October 4, 2008 "Shalom Auslander writes like Philip Roth's angry nephew. Foreskin's Lament is a scathing theological rant, a funny, oddly moving coming-of-age memoir, and an irreverent meditation on family, marriage, and cultural identity. God may be a bit irritated by this book, but I loved it." -- Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher "If you read this while you're eating, the food will come out your nose. Foreskin's Lament is a filthy and slightly troubling dialogue with God, the big, old, physically abusive ultra orthodox God who brought His Chosen People out of Egypt to torture them with non-kosher Slim Jims. I loved this book and will never again look at the isolated religious nutjobs on the fringe of American society with anything less than love and understanding." -- Matt Klam, author of Sam the Cat "What was it that Tolstoy said about unhappy families? While each may in fact be unique in its discontent, surely the one recalled here by Auslander (Beware of God: Stories, 2005) stands out from the rest for sheer outlandish, operatic misery. Auslander brings a mordant sense of humor to his portraits... and tells this sad story with a crucial touch of satire. An often breathtakingly irreverent look at religion and the humorous side of exorcising the past." -- Kirkus Review "Funny, fierce and subversively heartfelt.... Writing with humor and bitter irony about the most personal subjects, with deep, real-world consequences, is no task for an acolyte, although many have tried. With his middle finger pointed at the heavens and a hand held over his heart, Auslander gives us Foreskin's Lament. Mazel tov to him. And God? Well, he'll survive." -- New York Times Book Review "Even at his most rebellious, Portnoy-era Roth couldn't hold a candle to Shalom Auslander... Beneath the extremely funny shtick is one ferociously angry book." -- Entertainment Weekly "Mr. Auslander is no longer observant, but he is still a believer, and he believes in a wrathful, vengeful God who takes things personally and is not at all pleased when someone leaves the fold and writes an angry and very funny book about it." -- The New York Times [ Read More ] "Irreverent.... Foreskin's Lament is not only very funny, it also manages a light weightiness like Woody Allen's: thoughtful existential inquiries wrapped in everyone's-a-schmuck irony and giddy paranoia." -- Elle "[A] laugh riot... A comedic victory lap... Foreskin's Lament is a terrific book I was sad I read in so few sittings, because I wanted more." -- San Francisco Chronicle "A grim, uproarious account." -- Entertainment Weekly "Wryly comic." -- New York Magazine "If you've got the time, read [Foreskin's Lament] twice, once from right to left. You'll still laugh. It's that funny... Foreskin's Lament is a romp--relentlessly unrepentant and irreverent." -- San Francisco Bay Guardian "Hilarious... approximates what David Sedaris would sound like if his neuroses revolved entirely around matters of Orthodox Judaica." -- Esquire "Dark and hilarious." -- New York Magazine "In his corrosively funny memoir, "Foreskin's Lament," Auslander claims he is a foreskin: singled out, cut off and cast forth. In reality, he is something much more Jewish, almost essentially so. He's an apikores, a heretic.... It is nothing less than a portrait of the artist with a cheeseburger and fries." -- The Forward "Bitingly comic." -- O, the Oprah magazine "Hilarious and biting... brims with righteous anger." -- Details "A very funny memoir that more than delivers on the promise of his short-story collection, Beware of God." -- GQ "Auslander traces his adversarial relationship with the Almighty through a series of hilarious but gut-wrenching episodes from his childhood and adolescence." -- Library Journal "Auslander is an entertaining and engaging writer... His use of humor to leaven painful subject matter invites comparison to Dave Eggers and David Sedaris." -- Houston Chronicle "Bitterly funny." -- Jerusalem Post "Foreskin's Lament is funny, smart and heartbreaking.... [T]he first true literary depiction of a certain brand of American Orthodoxy.... Auslander's rants may sound like kvetching, but think about it, Jeremiah and Isaiah kvetched a bit too. It's what prophets do." -- Jerusalem Post "Foreskin's Lament is a hilarious and wildly irreverent story of the author's dysfunctional relationship with God." -- New York Daily News "In a nifty reversal of so many contemporary memoirs, whose authors seek to gain spirituality, Auslander seeks ardently and unsuccessfully to lose it." -- Washington Post "Lyrical, hysterical, and refreshingly atypical.... Auslander's work is funny and angry, and it shows a real struggle with the notion of living right and the inner debate over what 'right' is." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer "Angry, outrageous, incriminating, Foreskin's Lament is... a very funny book. If God has a sense of humor, Auslander might be in the clear." -- Toronto Star "Foreskin's Lament is a very, very funny book. It is also a very, very angry book... Foreskin's Lament manages to occupy a station left open in the current Religion Debates. At one end we find the True Believers and at the other we find Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins denouncing religion as the root of all evil, the solace of dupes. For all his asperity, Auslander reports to us from the middle, as one who can't deny religion's contradictions and lunacies yet has been unable to entirely do away with belief and its necessity. In this, he is probably more representative of most Americans than either of the extremes, and it is in those moments that Foreskin's Lament is most heartfelt and effective." -- Philadelphia Inquirer "Unforgettable... [Auslander is] America's hottest, funniest, most controversial young Jewish memoirist . . . I challenge even the most disapproving of his parents' friends to read this blackly hilarious, groundbreaking memoir without wiping tears of both kinds from their eyes" -- The Times "Outrageously funny... Dazzling... Raw brilliance infused with classic Jewish irony... This is indeed a lament, but a lament with attitude" -- Sunday Telegraph, Seven "Hilarious and devastating... Few books really are laugh-out-loud funny. This one is." -- Naomi Alderman, Sunday Times "Hilarious... Don't miss this fantastic book � you won't find anything angrier or funnier" -- Sainsbury's magazine "It's one of the funniest books I've ever read" -- Observer "Foreskin's Lament... will doubtless be a book that people will read and remember. And that, as Auslander himself might put it, would be so God." -- Review Saturday Guardian "Hilarious... highly blasphemous, but endlessly entertaining." -- Big Issue in Scotland "A hilarious memoir that bristles with tetchiness and outrage... It exhilarates... His curt, kvetchy sentences, always with an unexpected kick, make the book relentlessly entertaining . . . But Auslander's flippancy never stops him from showing us his attempts at empathy, and it is their failure that lends his memories an emotional heft... A seriously funny memoir." -- Literary Review "Auslander may feel he has failed as a Jew, but as a memoirist he is peerless: this is one of the funniest, darkest, rudest accounts of man and God ever written." -- Sunday Telegraph Summer Reading Special "Never; frankly, can there have been a more blasphemous book. This memoir makes The God Delusion look like a parish newsletter." -- The Independent on Sunday "Painfully poignant and hilariously noir." -- Jewish Chronicle "Although the 'I had such a terrible childhood' genre is oversaturated and notable chiefly for covers featuring black and white portraits of small children, Shalom Auslander's memoir is so exceptional that it deserves to be considered outside this category" -- Time Out London