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books: Running With Scissors
Title:      Running With Scissors
Authors:      Augusten Burroughs
ISBN-10(13):      0312938853
Publisher:      St. Martins Press
Publication date:      2006-08-29
Edition:      1st edition
Language:      Not specified
Price:      CDN$ 9.89
Rating:      4 
Picture:      cover
Click on the picture to get further information about this book!
Description:      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 medicines and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a paedophile 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 glamorises it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a cappella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward.

Burroughs' 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' survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all.

--John Moe, Amazon.com --
   
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Reviews
Odd but good
2008-10-13 00:00:14 Anonymous 4.5 
By Horace Killweather (Greater Lake Washington) Our book club is known for picking a little of this, a little of that. But recently we seemed to have a theme going. We picked three books ("Lullaby" by Palahniuk, "Katzenjammer" by McCrae), and finally "Running With Scissors by Burroughs. All three were in the category "out there" but we enjoyed each and everyone. My only complaint with Running was that some of the "themes" didn't seem to so anywhere. I would have liked to seee the electroshock machine actually shock someone, and one of the the wackos who lived upstairs was one of the more memorable characters; yet she never really developed into the story line. Still, I imagine that most have seen the movie now and are buying the book for this reason. It was an interesting read and if you like something really new and edgy, this would be the book.
 
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