|
| Running with Scissors: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy Used: $2.00
You Save: $5.99 (75%)
New (56) Used (117) Collectible (3) from $2.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  821 reviews
Sales Rank: 2771
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312938853
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312938857
ASIN: 0312938853
Publication Date: August 29, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: * Item in good condition- Typical Used Book and at a great price! * We carefully inspected this * Great customer service * Satisfaction Guaranteed!
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Hard to Believe March 8, 2007
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
Augusten's parents have always had problems. His father is an alcoholic and his mother has some sort of mental illness that causes her to have periodic psychotic episodes. As a result of this stress, Augusten spent his early life in obsessive-compulsive behaviors, spending hours polishing jewelry or making sure his hair was absolutely flat on his head. When Augusten's parents decide to divorce, his mother becomes more and more attached to her psychiatrist, an unconventional man who lives with his family and various patients in an old run-down Victorian house. When Augusten's mother needs some time to focus on herself, she sends twelve-year-old Augusten to live with Dr. Finch.
The Finch household is always in chaos. The children are not expected to follow any sorts of rules, and they seem to spend most of their time exploring dangerous or destructive hobbies, such as playing with an electric shock machine or tearing down the ceiling of the kitchen. At first Augusten is horrified, but soon he becomes complacent. He no longer feels like he has to look perfect. He becomes friendly with Dr. Finch's daughter, and he starts to think of the Finch household as his home.
However, despite being able to loosen up, Augusten's life is certainly not ideal. He decides, with Dr. Finch's blessing, to stop going to school in the seventh grade. Much of his time is spent going to movies, smoking marijuana and drinking. He is raped by another of Finch's adopted sons, a man in his thirties with whom Augusten then begins a longtime sexual relationship.
In the end, Augusten survives his teenage years. His life goes on and he looks back on this time in his life with a sense of humor, to the point that he tries to make his memoir into a comedy.
My first problem with this book is that I don't believe it. Everything about this family was so outrageous, it could not possibly have been as bad as Burroughs makes it out to be. He describes the Finch household as being on a street of tidy Victorians inhabited by nice, normal neighbors. Yet not one of them ever complained about the weirdness of the Finch family? Nobody ever called social services about the children living in squalor, not attending school, setting up their living space in the front yard?
I did like the idea that children are resilient enough to have been horribly neglected and abused, as most of the children in this story are, but still turn out okay in the end. Augusten and Natalie, both sexually abused by older men at impressionable ages, were able to pull their lives together. They each had the strength to move on from their childhoods and become productive adults. It's an admirable idea.
However, I found it distasteful that Burroughs would decide to turn the horrifying neglect and abuse of his childhood (if, in fact, any of it is true) into a lighthearted comedy. I suppose after living through such circumstances a person would build up a defense so as not to go crazy, but I can't imagine reading this and chuckling about the silly antics of that child-raping Neil or kooky old Dr. Finch, giving Augusten the drugs and booze he needs to stage a suicide attempt. Are these situations really funny to anyone?
 Brilliant. June 22, 2002
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
...and oh so funny.
This is one of those memoirs that compels you to read "just one more chapter" until you find you've finished the entire book while the work you meant to do piles up, suddenly unimportant. I have not laughed this hard since I read Naked by David Sedaris. The details alone catapult one back into the sordid seventies and eighties, while the characters leap off the page in all their gruesomely hilarious glory. I don't think I've ever read anything like this - Burroughs is a true original, and deftly avoids sentimentality or the urge to make his characters sympathetic. It's a wonderful book. I cannot wait to see what this young genius thinks of next. Highly recommended, and hugely entertaining.
This Just Doesn't Cut It! December 17, 2002
16 out of 33 found this review helpful
When I used to grade student themes, I could find something good to say about the worst of papers. Here goes for this book. The title is clever; some of the chapter titles are clever; the writer can turn a phrase. I'm thinking now, for example, of his description of his mother's Georgia accent making everything she said sound "like it went through a curling iron." I suspect Mr. Burroughs would be a scintillating dinner guest, but I did not need, however, 300 or so pages about these people none of whom I cared a whit about. My first problem with the book is the author's note: "The names and other identifying characteristics of the persons included in this memoir have been changed." Doesn't changing "indentifying characteristics" make this book fiction? At the very least, the reader has the right to ask how much of these events really happened. For the author's sake, I hope many of them did not. This is simiply the worst book I've read this year with no other book coming anywhere close to being second. I thought I would not be able to finish it and cannot for the life of me understand how it (a)was a best seller and(b) got all those glowing reviews. Try this little tidbit. The crazy psychiatrist who takes in this youngster to save him from his crazy mother-- I believe Mr. Burroughs is 12 when he begins this tale-- for a time looks at his excrement every morning in the toilet bowl to see if the "coils" turn upward. If they do "coil upward," this is a good omen for him. I rest my case.
Needless Graphic Descriptions May 8, 2003
16 out of 32 found this review helpful
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.
 Well written but...yikes September 9, 2003
16 out of 36 found this review helpful
I wish I had read the reviews on amazon.com before picking up this book, I would have been warned about the graphic gay sex passages. What started out as a nutty memoir about a clean-freak little boy dumped into a dysfunctional household of demented squalor quickly turned into a harrowing tale of child molestation. Despite the fact that Borroughs has come to accept his homosexuality (he never really addresses it) and his articulate narrative would make you think otherwise, this was still just a 13-year-old kid getting sexually abused by a deranged adult.It's very well written, but I wish the author would've turned some his powers of observation on himself. He details the lunatics of his childhood, from his raving mother to her insane psychiatrist as well as lesbian lovers and dirty feral children, but he just throws out details about himself without explanation or reflection. "I'm gay," he simply announces.
But, with his life, I could see where he would more interested by the people around him.
Maybe that's his point.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
