Rating: 
Summary: A sad story.
Review: I was expecting something a little different. A friend of mine told me it was a funny story. It had its moments, but I couldn't get past the childhood pain. It makes me wonder about my friend. If you're looking for a funny story without the misery, I recommend DELANO by John Orozco.
Rating: 
Summary: Needless Graphic Descriptions
Review: I read this book as an avid reader of novels of all types but at the end, reviewed the book as the psychiatrist that I am becaue of the disturbing descriptions contained in it of what were essentially long lurid tales of the author's being raped by a homosexual man who was 20 years his senior. Many of the descriptions of his growing up were sad, not funny, and people who find this tragic story funny would probably laugh at any tragedy as it unfolds. This man was a victim of a crazy, pathological mother and a misguided psychiatrist who should have been driven out of the profession, jailed and banished from the world of medicine forever. If this story had been that of a 13 year old girl who was systematically taken advantage of by her 30+ year old "lover", it probably would have evoked howls of protest. This is another example of "art by exclusion" because of some critics need to find the most objectionable and provocative examples of expression artistic even though it has no redeeming value. I would not recommend this book to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: Running with scissors hysterical
Review: I am not much of a book reader but this book really got me into wanting to read more books. It's an easy read and it is a hysterical account of a young man's upbringing. The way he tells the memior makes it funny but he had a really abnormal upbringing. I liked the authors style of writing so much that after I read this book I went out and get the other book he had written "sellivision" it was hysterical as well but running with scissors was by far the best book I have EVER read. I am now waiting for his new book "DRY" to hit the market this month i believe.
Rating: 
Summary: a bit overblown
Review: i think there is such thing as too blase, too nonchalant. the book itself was okay, but i thought there was very little substance to it. you knew what was going on, but not how the "protaganist" was actually feeling, or how he was affected. most of the time memoirs have some goal in mind, this one seemed to have only one goal and it was a slight one at that; to shock you and amaze you. there was very little emotional depth, and i found that disappointing.
Rating: 
Summary: Just how much worse can someone's life get?
Review: I read this book with a sense of horror and amazement--horror that someone's life could be that terrible and topsey-turvey, and amazement that he could not only survive it, but come away so articulate and matter-of-fact about it all. I felt a lot of guilt, too, because I could relate to the craziness of his mother, and I fear, could I be marking my children the way Augusten's mother marked him? Still, there is hope admist all the chaos and clutter, in that the author comes away seeming somewhat normal. The ending is a little bit abrupt, but then, life does sometimes come out that way, and this book is about real life, however warped it may be. Read this book, but only with a strong stomach.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but will not recommend
Review: I had a very hard time reading the book due to the explicit nature in which he described his sexual encounters with the older man, Bookman. It is an unfortunate reality in many lives (child molestation/abuse, which is exactly the way I interpreted it in this book), but his manner in telling some of these situations sounded too nonchalant for me. I literally felt sick to my stomach after reading these instances. I gave it three stars because there were only a few places in the book that had this affect on me, otherwise I think the book is a fairly good read. Proud to be an American!
Rating:
Summary: A plethora of insanity
Review: This is the story of a young man who suffers greatly from his parents divorce. His father is cold and unloving, and his mother is a downright nut. She is selfish, and does not EVER put her child's needs before her own. She starts seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, who may be more disturbed than she is, and eventually leaves her son to live with the man. Dr. Finch has several very disturbed children of his own, as well as various patients living with him at any given time. When Augusten reveals that he is gay to Hope, one of the doctor's daughters, she introduces him to a former patient that is also gay, but a lot older than Augusten. This older man takes advantage of Augusten's youth and vulnerability throughout most of Augusten's teenage years, and while both Dr. Finch and Augusten's mother are aware of the relationship, neither one ever intervenes! One of the psychiatrist's younger daughters (whose name escapes me at the moment) confides regularly in Augusten, and while she is far from being emotionally stable (Her father allowed her to live with a man more than twice her age, whom she had a sexual relationship with in her preteen years, because he believes in allowing children to choose their own parents. The man eventually begins to beat her and she moves back home.), she is probably the only reason that Augusten has any sense of self worth. The memoir is full of incidents that no normal human being should have to experience, from helping Dr. Finch interpret messages from God in his bowel movements to Augusten confronting his mother about a lesbian relationship with a minister's wife, and you have to wonder why no one ever reported Dr. Finch or Augusten's mother to authorities. This book is not written for the faint of heart, and the reader should be prepared for some very harsh, sometimes graphic, scenarios.
Rating:
Summary: Selective Memory?
Review: Since I attended college and spent many years hanging out in the environs of Amherst and Northampton, Massachusetts, I can say that the physical world Burroughs evokes is a true one. I am just not sure if his life is. This book portrays a series of events and people that are so far off-balance and off-kilter that it's hard to really believe that this happened to Burroughs. Whether or not Burroughs only took select events to present and embellish, the result is so out there that the center really doesn't hold. I ended up viewing this book more as a novel than a memoir. Some of the more questionable facets of this book are moments where Burroughs seems to recall every detail, every facial tic during conversations that had occurred almost 25 years earlier. (A similar fault that I saw with Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club.") Running with Scissors is an enjoyable enough read, and amusing, but I think it tries to hard to be a bit clever and skewed. The sex scenes with a much older man are not only explicit but disturbing. Not for the faint of heart.
Rating:
Summary: Is Veracity Relevant?
Review: This is such a wonderful book that it seems churlish to bring up the veracity question, but it is a question that must arise in dealing with these memoirs of horrific childhoods because they often bring up important issues of how to help such children. How can we defend the gay teenager from persecution? Does being permissive about teen-age sexuality lead to sexual exploitation? Does the Ronald Laing type of psychiatrist do any good?
When the author refers to Dr Finch being found guilty by the Americam Medical Association on charges of insurance fraud I suppose it's the kind of inaccuracy that might be just due to careless research.
The Anne Sexton parallels need further explanation. Some who have written about this book suggest that the remarkable resemblance is because Augusten's mother modelled herself on Anne Sexton. However Sexton died in 1974 and the biographies that described her behavior were not written until years later. Searching for Mercy Street was published in 1994. The action of this book takes place in the late 1970's. (At the age of 15 he watches Princess Diana's wedding, which was 1981).
Consider the Christmas tree scene in Linda Gray Sexton's book that begins "a thick symmetric tree tall enough to brush the rafters of the cathedral ceiling." Burroughs has "the tree nearly reached the top of out seventeen foot ceiling." Episode after episode about the mother has these Anne Sexton similarities.
Rating:
Summary: Great description of a twisted childhood
Review: At times shockingly bizarre, I found this memoir of a twisted childhood very entertaining most of the time and quite nauseating the rest of the time (but mainly in a good way). It's hard not to love the guy at least a little, and it's surprising that he didn't turn out to be some type of sociopath or start a cult for rabbits or something. I also had to wonder whether he's not actually kind of proud of all the weirdness of his youth, though it would take an army of shrinks to fully analyze the case. The quality of writing is excellent and, overall, this is a very entertaining read. Avery Z. Conner, author of "Fevers of the Mind".
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