Rating: 
Summary: A Fascinating, Inspiring, and Jaw Dropping Experience!
Review: Are you looking for that one book that will satisfy your every curiousity, every desire? Child abuse, mental health tradgedies, homosexuality, triumph, humor, pedophilia, and so much more, are all included beneath the covers of this rare find!The story is about Augusten Burroughs (This IS an autobiography, you know...meaning TRUE story) and tells about his dysfunctional family and their demise. He is finally given over to his mother's shrink and lives with their family throughout his childhood. His story tells of someone cleaning one plate and saying, "If someone's hungry, I washed a plate," people arguing who will take out the Christmas tree and so, in result, it isn't taken out, A pedophile patient who lives in the shed out back and becomes one of Augusten's first sexual encounters, stopping school because he's just not interested, Reading the futre by "reading" the turds from the family bowel movements, and so much more! To rise above these conditions... To even be able to write baout them with such wit and clarity... These are characteristics of a true survivor. A true success. Whether you're interested in mental health, in abuse issues or in simply a good, honest-to-goodness, autobiography, this book would be an asset to anyone's library. Recommended to the highest degree! "o)
Rating:
Summary: absolutely hilarious and utterly honest
Review: One chapter into this book, you're not going to believe that it's a memoir. It's just too weird--the characters are bizarre, but ultimately lovable. And the things that happen... Let's just say that it will get you thinking about what people really do behind closed doors. Augusten Burroughs channels the humor that must have gotten him through his hugely traumatic childhood. He pens his memoir with abundant humor and without animosity or self-pity.
Rating: 
Summary: An Unmemorable Memoir
Review: In one word, I found this book to be "junk". It's a perfect example of how vacuous our culture has become, and what now passes for good writing is a shallow piece of nothing like this. Whether it's true or not, there is absolutely no depth of feeling or analysis. After awhile the quality of shock wore off, and I put the book down thinking to myself: "Who cares?" The accolades poured on this book astonish me now that I've read it. I will be extremely vigilant about picking up a "memoir" from now on. It seems people have become a little too navel-gazey for my taste, thinking their story has something unique or special or in this case, quirky, that the world must know about. Perhaps that should be one of the criteria for a writer undertaking a memoir of him/herself: how badly does the world need another one of these, and am I really so special that everyone needs to know about me?
Rating: 
Summary: Not funny, not entertaining
Review: This book is just mildly amusing & more disturbing than anything else. There is one "gross out" scene after another not to mention pedophilia, coprophilia, substance abuse, animal cruelty, rape, & child abuse. This is supposed to be funny? Perhaps it would be a more bearable read if the author were somewhat articulate, but regrettably, this is not the case. If you are looking for a really funny read in this vein, try David Sedaris.
Rating:
Summary: Really, no stars
Review: I bought this book, because of the great review I read in the paper. Yet, the writer of the review forgot one thing. That you could also find it in the "Adult Porn" or "Gay Porn" section of your nearest bookstore!!! I didn't even finish reading it, and took it back to where I purchased it for a full refund. It started out as enjoyable reading, funny, odd, etc., but in no way did I expect to read the detailed descriptions of the authors trysts with a gay man. Couldn't he just have hinted at what happened, did he feel that he needed to give the reader every disgusting detail of what happened? Did he mentioned any of these parts of the book during his book signings or tv show appearances? How many books would he have sold then? I don't need trash like that in my house, thank you. Maybe we need to put ratings on books like we do with CD's and DVD's for sexual content, etc. Yuck.
Rating: 
Summary: Left Me On The Fence
Review: This book was recommended to me by a friend with a very dry and cynical sense of humor who absolutely loved the book and said she couldn't put it down. I read it because we tend to like similar books and movies. When I was finished, I couldn't quite decide how I felt about it. Much of the time during my reading of the book, I felt like a rubber-necker coming onto a bad traffic accident: I wanted to look out of morbid curiosity, but I felt wrong for wanting to look and then, ultimately, felt sick about what I saw. One moment I was horrified, the next laughing, the next fascinated (I have degrees in psychology and social work), and the next I felt like crying. Signs of a good book? Sometimes, yes. But do I feel that this was a good book? Not necessarily. I feel bad for the author that this was his upbringing, but it also troubles me that he seems so detached from it all and doesn't mind profiting from the telling of his dysfunctional life story. I plan to read his next book ("Dry") to help me form a better opinion about him as a writer. As another critic said in a review, it will be interesting to see how he fares as a novelist after writing his memoirs. So, bottom line? I think it was an... interesting read.
Rating:
Summary: Tragically Hilarious
Review: Bypassing the plot summary you can get from the other reviewers, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to most people. I would not recommend it to my fundamentalist Christian friends or homophobic friends. But anyone else should appreciate the dark humor. The author somehow manages to reflect lightheartedly on what would otherwise be considered a tragic childhood by today's politically correct, over-reactive, society. Yes, what happened to this guy was awful, but his ability to look back on it and make us laugh is wonderful. I was captivated the whole time, never really wanting to put this book down. I couldn't wait to see what happened next. Burroughs really knows how to tell a story, and since it's based on truth, I really appreciated the epilogue.
Rating:
Summary: Burroughs's personal song could be I will survive
Review: For many reasons, Augusten Burroughs's personal mantra could be Gloria Ganyor's 'I will survive'. It is amazing to see of how much this guy went through and came up a winner. Yes, he is. Living among those people many others could have surrundered and gone crazy. If his book were fiction, it would be too, well, unbelievable to be true. But since it is Burroughs's memoirs, we do believe in those 'characters' that he brings to his pages. We all know that there is all kind human being out there --even the most strange. So, why not have them all toghether in the same house? If it were fiction we'd say it is strange to have them all in the same place, but it is reality and it is not by chance that so many strange people were gathered in a house. Burroughs has a powerful voice, and his narrative is dense and funny at the same time. Sometimes we forget how bad that could be living in such an environment, because it seems that he had fun indeed with some things --not everything, of course. 'Running with Scirssors' is one of the best memoirs released lately and it must be discovered to open people's mind and eyes to how really complicated life can be sometimes, but, we can still manage to be a survivor.
Rating:
Summary: Burroughs VS. Sedaris
Review: with this piece, burroughs takes us into so many places we don't want to go and even more places few have already visited. the similarities between him and david sedaris, whom he is constantly compared with, end with homosexuality and conversational prose. that's about the end of it. this is a story about a kid from a dysfunctional family thrown into an even more dysfunctional family. the characters are perfectly developed and extremely interesting. the story has a hard time keeping up with the characters because the timing is loose and the topics wander. it is so full of people who you can't feel good about or sorry for, i found myself just wishing hannibal lecter would show up and make burgers out of them. still, i found quite a bit of it funny when it wasn't trying to be funny. there are several times when burroughs is deliberately trying to be humorous and that's when he falls flat. there are three or four scattered depictions of straight out homosexual sex and if you're not cool with that sort of thing, you will be as surprised as i was to have it hit you in the face without warning. i would rather not read about anything like that, myself. when i say explicit, i mean it. it's gay porn sometimes.
Rating:
Summary: Trash posturing as a true story.
Review: A disfunctional family that lives in filth and excrement. A line or two may be funny, but a normal reader would perhaps miss them in the miasma. A waste of time reading about wasted lives. There may be some truths in Burrough's memoir, but I believe that most of it is just his mind play.
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