Rating: 
Summary: Dark humor at its finest
Review: Just when you think these freaks can't get any more dysfunctional, they do. My girlfriend, Christy, recommended "Running With Scissors" to me and about midway through the book I started to email her and tell her that she needed psychiatric care for reading, let alone recommending, this book. Unfortunately, it's also very absorbing and I couldn't put it down long enough to tell Christy what I thought of her choice of reading material.
It's like some heart-stopping picture that you see posted on the internet somewhere - an extreme genital piercing or horrifying accident. You look; gasp and close your browser; reopen your browser and take another look, prepared for it this time; close your browser again in a fit of squeamishness; then look again, much longer this time; and just keep doing that until you're desensitized enough to explore the picture in all it's vivid goriness.
So I'll recommend this book, too, but not for the faint at heart. And now I'll have to get "Dry" so I can find out the rest of the story.
Rating: 
Summary: Incredible story
Review: I had difficulties putting this book down simply because I was too good to be set aside. It is a unique and quite as bizarre story. Nevertheless, I consider this book to be memorable, highly disturbing, touching, fascinating and quite very funny. I recommend it to those with strong stomachs. However, for mild, strong or weak stomachs who love good reads,I recommend THE USURPER AND OTHER STORIES.Also recommended: DISCIPLES OF FORTUNE
Rating:
Summary: Boy Interrupted
Review: I enjoyed the wry, self-eviscerating essays in MAGICAL THINKING enough to be curious about their author, Augusten Burroughs. In MAGICAL THINKING Burroughs dropped a lot of clues about his dysfunctional childhood, drugs & alcohol problems, indifference to education, obsessions with pop culture (and especially beauty culture), inappropriate sex partners, and crazy mother. What's not to identify with? I was intrigued, and when I picked up RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, I was halfway expecting to see my own reflection. But, that wasn't my experience. Behind the humor (one person's defense mechanism is another's survival tool!), is a portrait of a lost childhood and a sense of alienation that make's Holden Caulfield's look like a bellyache. From MAGICAL THINKING I know that Burroughs's story has a reasonably happy ending. (If not a happy ending, at least that he was eventually able to make more than Tom Collinses from the lemons life gave him.) Burroughs went through a lot (including being legally relinquished by his mother to the care of her dubiously qualified psychiatrist at age 13). While living in the psychiatrist's household he becomes the underage lover of his adopted brother (twice his age) and manages with the enabling help of his "shrink father" to scam the school system into letting him quit school before the legal age of 16. Burroughs was the archetypal at-risk youth, and it says a lot about our society that children can so easily fall off the radar screen. Read RUNNING WITH SCISSORS for the laughs, or read it as biting social commentary--but read it.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect Title
Review: "Running With Scissors" is the perfect title for this memoir. It is exactly how the author feels...as though playing rush and roulette with your own life. The book is an excellent read. Explains much about addictions and the courage it takes to overcome.
Also recommend: Nightmares Echo and Dry
Rating:
Summary: The Finches = Addams Family Dysfunction?
Review:
Dear Reader:
If you've never heard of this book, and feel like really laughing -- then "Running With Scissors" is definitely the book for you. It's the story of a broken family and a nutty, terminally-selfish mother who, following her divorce, allows her son to take up permanent residence in her shrink's house, a family in total chaos, where no boundaries are established and everyone is allowed to run amok.
Yes, at one point I thought I was back, watching the once popular 60s TV series The Addams Family. Sing along now:...the Finches..."they're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, all together oooky...the Finches, er Ad-dams Fa-mi-lee!..."
"BUT IT'S SO DISTURBING!"
Is this book disturbing, as other reviewers have mentioned? Not really. I didn't find it "disturbing" at all because it was told in such a cartoonish and comic way -- it would be like getting upset over a Roadrunner cartoon in which the coyote keeps dropping off a cliff or getting his face blackened after a back-fired explosion. ("That poor coyote!" Pass me a valium.)
No, this book is NOT recommended for members of the Christian Coalition. If you're easily shocked then defer to the latest Oprah pick instead. There's mention of gay sex (EGAD!), parental lesbianism (guess that would fall under "gay sex"), mentions of fortune-telling turds, home wrecking, and infidelity, even yeast infections and pedophilia! Basically, this book throws everything at you but the kitchen sink. There's a "holy sh*t!" to be uttered on every page: the surprises never stop coming.
"Running With Scissors" is truly a fun and lively and very bouncy book. Like many, I doubt the "truth" of this boyhood account (so-called memoir [...yawn!]), but find it very enjoyable, one of the best books I've read so far this year, but try it for yourself! Pick up a copy! Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to Burroughs, but very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition" by Richard Perez -- another exceptional, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.
Thank you for your time,
Your humble reviewer.
Rating: 
Summary: You gotta have a stomach.
Review: You've got to have a stomach for this one. Augusten Borroughs is a gifted writer. He definately can make you visualize a scene. But this book is not what I thought it would be from all the reviews I read about it. I find nothing at all hilarious or funny about this boy's disfunctional life. It's hard to believe, although I knew there is life like this, that there is a family like the Finch's and that at the small age of 12-13 he knows he is gay and has always known. I wonder if he is gay at all sometimes, but rather tends to do the things and wants the things that we label as female. His very graphic discriptions of his sex life with Neil I think are a bit too graphic. I felt compassion for him and for all the children (and adults for that matter) out in the world that experience such a terrible life. If you are faint at heart, don't read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Running with Scissors (and other rules to be broken)
Review: I bought this book along with its companion book Dry last spring during a severe depressive episode that landed me in a psychiatric hospital for a summer visit. I found that I could not start either book. It was frustrating, I couldn't get past the first chapter of either one. My therapist would ask, "What are you reading?" And she nodded, approving of me reading these books. I was however, not reading the books but reading what my therapist calls, " The equivalance of chewing gum." So, I appeased (lied to) my therapist by telling her I was reading literature, when in fact I was reading nothing more taxing than cereal box. It is now a full year later, and I have just finished Running with Scissors. I literally could not put the book down for the past 2 hours because I was laughing till I cried over the lunacy depicted in the book. I kept visualizing my own whacky childhood and realized that there are people out there who completely understand what it is like to grow up in crazy. I read Dry first, which also had me howling with laughter and recognition of a fellow alcoholic. I was I'll admit, a little afraid of what Scissors would tell. While I do not regret the past, nor wish shut the door on it, I am kicking myself that I didn't read both of them sooner. What I learned from both of the books is that optimism, acceptance, acerbic humor and reading turds like tea leaves is a perfectly fine way to remember childhood. Thank god I got my meds balanced and took the plunge on these two books! Thank you Augusten Burroughs for being fearless and giving the world this splendid gift of crazy.
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