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 enlarge | Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $12.85
You Save: $12.10 (48%)
New (55) Used (29) Collectible (14) from $11.75
Rating:  99 reviews
Sales Rank: 2138
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312342020
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312342029
ASIN: 0312342020
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW, IN-HOUSE READY TO SHIP!!! NOT A BARGAIN, REMAINDER OR BOOKCLUB BOOK!!! WE ARE A 5 STAR SELLER.
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| Customer Reviews:
 An authentic look at a lonely childhood August 13, 2008
This is the first book I read by Burroughs, so I think that I had a bit of an advantage on other people who had read his previous work. I tend to stay away from memoirs to begin with. To me they are generally pretty boring and the authors usually end up sounding like either great whiners or petty bores. And some of the details that Burroughs writes about in this book may saddle him with that same tag, but the emotions that he is able to dredge up outshine any confessions that struck me as unnecessary or too one sided. Indeed, that seems to me to be the greatest strength of the book. The emotions are raw and unfiltered to the degree that they are intensely childlike, there is almost no filter of the mature adult. It is all the greedy emotion of the child who just wants the love and affection of their father. It is irrelevant that his father is in constant pain from arthritis and alcoholism. The child in the book only wants love and the precious gift of time from his parents, neither of which he gets. Other reviews have focused on the intenst narcacissim in the book, but isn't that the point? Who isn't completely focused on themselves and their own needs at that age? I thought the book to be a quite authentic look at the needs and wants(despite how selfish they may be) of a young child. Whether the details are true or not is beside the point; the emotions are crystal clear and almost piercing in their clarity. Focusing on what is true and what is not is a con game of the publishers who market this book. They bank on people reading the book for the sheer joy of reading about a train wreck of a family, or squealing in delight when we come to a part that rings false. The details are unimportant. The book is a faithful recreation of a childhood spent isolated and in fear of the people who are supposed to love you the most. Debating whether it's true or not is a waste of time.
 Boring!!! August 3, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Sorry Mr. Burroughs, but when you started describing your memories as a toddler, I knew I'd made a mistake in purchasing this book. I found it to be shallow and contrived and I hate to say this, but I almost felt sorry for your father. What a whiney, dull memoir, that certainly doesn't live up to the hype.
 Lacks the humor of his other books July 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A bummer to read. It doesn't take long to get the point that his father was cruel. It must have been cathartic for the author to write, but it didn't need to be a whole book, especially because we already learned about his violent, psoriasis-encrusted dad in "Running with Scissors."
 AMAZING BOOK July 28, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I felt everything Augusten felt as I read this book - the fear, the confusion of an innocent child, always just eager for his father's love - and never really understanding WHY he wouldn't receive it ....
brought tears to my eyes as I empathized with Augusten but also out of the FEAR that he felt all the while growing up... he made me feel it too.
Disappointing and self-pitying saga of Augusten's relationship with his father. July 28, 2008
Augusten's earlier book "Dry" was witty, also compelling and touching in parts. I liked it much more than "Running with Scissors" as that seemed to be told from a teen's view point.
A Wolf at the Table once again comes from a kid's perception of his father. This book was boring for me as it's told from a child's view point, with no real adult insight to temper the fantastic situations he describes. It's clear that Augusten's dad was not the best dad in the world but there have been other more abusive father-son relationships than what the author faced, where children have lived in real fear of parental torture and even sexual abuse.
At some point this book becomes a slightly self pitying narrative, and it seems Augusten is blaming most of his problems as an adult on this failed relationship with his father. Some of the terrifying scenes from the book are dreams Augusten rather than real facts and seem like his active child's imagination at play. His father comes across as a sad, depressed and angry alcoholic from the book, tormented by his own shortcomings. The dark side exists in all of us, his father seemed to give it more free rein due to his negativity, but he really did not torture his child. Augusten seems to have been a bit of what would be called a "sissy" as a kid and it we can see from the situations Augusten recounts that his dad was a little irked by it.
It would have been a far better book if Augusten had peppered it with his adult insight into the mind of father. Instead, the book ends up been a self-pitying narrative as we never really get to learn about what really drove his father's dislike of him. This book was also devoid of the biting humor of some of his other books which makes it hard to keep on reading page after page. I somehow plowed through it but it did not leave me with any insight at the end. It just made me want to say "Grow up, Augusten. The world can be a bad place and not everyone gets the best childhood. In fact, many children around the world are doing far worse than you did."
It seems like the author is running out of good material for memoirs. Maybe, he should now switch to fiction.
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