|
Running With Scissors: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $7.99
You Save: $9.96 (55%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  813 reviews
Sales Rank: 614
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B000FA5T1K
Publication Date: September 9, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe
Product Description
Almost everyone can claim a crazy childhood. But did you have a childhood with: An electroshock machine as your favorite toy? Parades through the neighborhood led by your adopted psychiatrist/father? The whole family sleeping on the front lawn for weeks on end? Scotch for breakfast at age 13? A faked suicide attempt to get excused from the sixth grade? A pedophile living in the backyard shed? A psychiatric patient locked in the upstairs bedroom? Christmas trees in May and turkey carcasses under the couch? Lithium, Valium, and Halcyon to eat like candy? Running With Scissors will shock, amaze and disturb you, and will never let you forget the story of an ordinary boy in anything-but-ordinary situation.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 808 more reviews...
 Certainly Isn't Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood August 29, 2008
If even just half of the instances in Mr. Burroughs' book are true, none of these characters should ever raise children until they get their acts together. The story is funny, very quirky, extremely disturbing and labeling these people as excessively dysfunctional is putting it waaaaaaaay too mildly. The book will not give you any warm fuzzies, that's for sure. If it does, you need psychiatric help. Mr. Burroughs is a wonderful writer with excellent comic timing. But please be warned, some of this stuff is brutal and troubling to the point of almost making me ill. Talking with someone who works with such families, these kind of idiosyncratic qualities are not that uncommon. Well worth reading, but be prepared.
 Run from this book...or take your scissors to it. August 18, 2008
The reviews on the cover of this book were wildly misleading; I found no pleasure or humor in reading this tragic and twisted memoir. I actually felt sickened and violated after being exposed to the author's graphic depiction of his first and abusive sexual experience. I actually wish the toxic memory of this book could be erased from my mind. As a result, I will NOT donate this book to Goodwill to pollute anyone else's mind...it will go straight to the TRASH where it belongs.
 This book is too easy to read August 15, 2008
If it was not for the overtly sexual and disturbing subject manner i would have thought this book was written by a ten year old boy. I got this book because it was at the dollar bookstore and i wanted a change a pace from the English Literature i have been reading lately.
I also got sick of all the pop culture references thought out the book. I also don't believe a lot of what in this memoir is true. The most appalling thing about this story is that all of the characters in this book felt it was ok for him to be sexually active when he was 13 and to have a 33 year old pedophile as a boyfriend. I gave this three stars because it was readable. Another thing that bugs me about this book is the way it is published. The words on the pages are too big and there is way too many spaces between the lines. This makes the book like 300 hundred pages. But if it was mass market paperback it would only be like 150 pages. With the enviorment in a state of decline i felt it should have used less paper. The only reason they made the book this way is too make it seem like it is a bigger book then it really is. If i paid the retail price for it i would have be livid.
Entertaining August 8, 2008
While skimming through the reviews for Running with Scissors, I noticed that readers either loved it or hated it. I think that it depends on how you look at the book. If you are expecting to be entertained by the bizarre stories that Burroughs tells throughout his memoir, I think you will love it. If you are expecting a great piece of literary work, not so much. Burroughs is comparable to David Sedaris, and although I have not read any of Sedaris's books, although I do own a few, I know that they are lightly written, you don't have to think while reading them books. I loved the book, I thought it was bizarre and hilarious, and I think that is all the reader is supposed to get out of it. So my opinion is that you will either love it or hate it depending on what your expectations of the book are.
Pure Trash August 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Augusten Burroughs should be ashamed of himself for writing such trash. It was neither funny...I can't beleive anyone would laugh at it, nor entertaining, nor horrible, because I don't for one minute beleive it was a true story. I read the first half and then threw it in the trachcan.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
