Rating: 
Summary: Blue Ribbon For Running With Scissors
Review: I give this book two enthusiastic thumbs up!!! I would encourage everyone that is interested enough to read the reviews of this book to go for it and read Running With Scissors. Augusten Burroughs takes us along with him as he recounts his bizarre and extremely unstable childhood. This writer has a real gift for describing the unbelievable situations in this book in a way that makes it Ok for the reader to laugh out loud. This book is proof positive that with a strong spirit we can make it through anything.
Rating: 
Summary: Disturbingly honest--and disturbingly funny
Review: When he was a teenager in Massachusetts during the 1970s, Augusten Burroughs kept daily journals recording everything that happened to him. "Running with Scissors" is a result of those journals, but it's unlikely that anyone who suffered experiences like his would need a journal to recall them. Instead, his diaries both gave him the therapeutic outlet he needed while growing up and supplied this book with the rich detail that makes it, at times, so unbelievable.Burrough's mother was a struggling poet who wanted to be like Anne Sexton, and, lacking any talent, she instead suffered Sexton's psychotic episodes. The father, unable to deal with his wife's instability, drank himself out of the relationship. Eventually, Burroughs is abandoned by his family and adopted by his mother's psychiatrist, a certifiable lunatic who dispenses drugs and sex far more diligently than sound advice and who believes discipline is an evil to be avoided at all costs. To complicate an already disastrous situation, other members of this adopted family include several deeply disturbed individuals, including a pedophile who finds a ready victim in the 14-year-old Burroughs. I read this book two months ago, and, while I found it simultaneously appalling and enjoyable, I didn't know what to make of it. Since then, I've read several press reports that address some of the rumors generated by this book's publication. No, none of the people described in this book have sued (or threatened to sue) the author for libel. True, no child with the name "Augusten Burroughs" ever lived anywhere near Northampton--because Burroughs legally changed his name when he was 18. In sum, I've read nothing to indicate that Burroughs is making it all up. Yet there are two criticisms of the book I don't understand. Unfortunately for Burroughs, the back cover includes a single blurb comparing him to David Sedaris, and many readers, unable to think for themselves, contrast the two authors and find Burroughs lacking. Other than being gay and funny (and it's insulting that that is all it takes for people to link the two authors), Burroughs and Sedaris have nothing in common--each has his own writing style and a unique sense of humor. It would be just as pertinent to compare him to Ru Paul. The second criticism is that Burroughs reproduces conversations verbatim from thirty years ago. Putting aside the fact that he was able to consult diaries to refresh his memory, this technique is not uncommon. J. R. Ackerley, Annie Dillard, and Philip Roth--to name just three I've read recently--all use the same conceit in their classic memoirs. Burroughs is not as good as these three writers--his prose is a bit austere, and the book teeters on the edge of John Waters-inspired camp. Nevertheless, criticism of "recreated" dialogue seems gratuitous: any detail in any autobiography can be censured on the same grounds. Burroughs quite successfully recreates for the reader certain episodes of his life--episodes no human being would have been able to forget--and the exact wording of recalled dialogue matters as much as the exact color of the polyester shirt he was wearing at the time. Regardless of its faults (both real and alleged), the book is vivid proof that Burroughs emerged from his past with a profound sense of dignity. In a recent interview, he said of the older man who sexually abused him: "Mostly I still feel an incredible rage that he would do that to a young person, but just as much as I feel that rage I feel sorry for him, because he was someone who was mentally ill and had the most atrocious therapist possible." This quote alone displays his uncanny ability to step back and reflect detachedly on his experiences and to be both empathetic and sympathetic even towards those who deserve his venom. Some readers will be disturbed by Burroughs's ability to laugh (and make us laugh) at what happened to him. Yet the book probably would have unbearable otherwise--and, if it weren't for his sense of humor, it's unlikely the author would be around to tell us his story at all.
Rating:
Summary: Amazingly Entertaining Train Wreck
Review: Reading this book filled me with two simultaneous and contradictory emotions. Envy. I wish my childhood was one tenth as entertaining as his was. And Gratitude. I'm really glad my childhood was so normal that it's not worth talking about. His story is that interesting and is definitely worth the read. Picture a Dickensian orphan's tale as told by the cast of a spinoff of the Mary Tyler Moore show.
Rating:
Summary: Twisted, but funny
Review: Wow, and I thought my childhood was whacky. These people can't be real, no shrink could be that screwed up! (Could he?) Shocking, entertaining, and compelling. Not for anyone who can be easily disturbed by the printed word. But for everyone else, yeah, go ahead and try this. Gives new meaning to the term 'dysfunctional family'.
Also recommended: NO ONE'S EVEN BLEEDING and DELANO
Rating: 
Summary: Extremely unsettling
Review: I felt truly sick after finishing this book. How could someone be even partially sane after living as Augusten did during his childhood and adolescence? Do people as emotionally bereft and unbalanced as the characters in this book really exist? Surely somone other than the waitress at the diner had the good sense and compassion to intercede in the insanity? Wouldn't the neighbors in the psychiatrist's neighborhood have registered numerous complaints with the authorities? My heart is unbelievably heavy at the thought that anyone, especially a child, has lived or lives like this.
Rating:
Summary: After I read it I picked it up and read it again!!!!!
Review: I loved this book so much, it is nothing like a Jerry Springer show. The characters, who are obviously real (aren't they?) are so increible and there are people in this book that I wish I could meet. Honestly, when I read Running With Scissors I thought I had the strangest, most horrible, funniest childhood, but Augusten's book about being raised by his mom's shrink in Northport made me think again.
I loved it when Augusten and Natalie sang in the Mental institution, when the psychiatrist starts predicting the future using his bowel movements and Hope, dear and lovely Hope, starts insisting the cat is dying for no reason. If you have ever felt as if your parents were no good read this, it will humble you, make you laugh out loud, and give you some kind of release from those all-too-serious self-help books that weigh your bookshelves down. I hope he writes many more books. If he does not, I'll be deeply dissapointed.
Rating: 
Summary: It made me laugh out loud several times.
Review: This is the tender story of thirteen-year-olds with middle-aged lovers, psychotic parents, oracular turds (yes, you read that right) 'bible dips' and a psychiatrist with a "Masturbatorium" in his offices. The last I heard, Burroughs was only being sued for libel by one relative, which shocks me far more than anything he wrote.
Rating:
Summary: Augusten
Review: If it wasn't a memoir I would have thought it gratuitous and tossed it aside! The fact that this is a true stroy makes it so very shocking. I went from finding it humorous to wanting to cry for the young Augusten. And I thought MY family was a freak show!!!
Well written with an amazing outlook on the authors part, a tribute to what the human child can endure. His realisation towards the end that if he could survive his childhood he could survive anything resonated.
I can't help but think a lot of the rave reviews are more about the amazing events described than the author's writing ability.
Rating:
Summary: Fact stranger than Fiction stranger than Fact
Review: Finishing reading the enormously entertaining RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, a 'memoir by Augusten Buroughs' poses the question "Can memoirs ever be fact when they are filtered by retrospection and memory distortion?" The key word here is 'memoirs', and so we can accept this as not an autobiorgraphy but a series of memories written down in a cathartic swoop. It really doesn't make any difference, this attempt to analyze the veracity of Burroughs' book. It remains a very fine foray into exploring where our youth find themselves in the world as it presents itself today. RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is filled with a cast of inimitable characters, and at times the characters become caricatures, so weird and bizarre their behavior. But at the core of this explosion of madness is the young narrator who hilariously but tenderly discusses his acceptance of being gay, his adoration of the cosmetic empires, his need to perform makeovers on his closer associates, and his steadfastness in living a life bordering the incredible and surviviing it all. Augusten Burroughs is a likeable kid and manages to influence all those who surround him: his thirtysomething lover (when he is but fourteen), a looney psychiatrist to whom his wholly mad mother deserts him, the Finch House wherein dwells the family of the new father/shrink in the midst of squalor and filth, his 'adopted' sisters, etc. The joy in reading this wild ride of a story is the calm demeanor in which it is told. I have no idea how much of this memior is true, but I don't really care. There is so much of the way we live - in global alienation - spun into searing details that, like all good comedy, hits us at the end with a kick in the gut. Recommended for the adventurous reader!
Rating:
Summary: this book is...excellent thing
Review: I read this book in a day, which is something ive never done b4!
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