[.ca] A Wolf At The Table: A Memoir of my Father (ISBN 0312342020)

Suspenseful and Very Real:
As a huge fan of Augusten Burrough books, I looked forward to reading A Wolf at the Table. This book is quite different than his others, it is a serious and passionate memoir and his life with his father. The first paragraph was enough to draw me into the book and Burrough's life. From the beginning, the tension is almost unbearable as facts about his father are slowly revealed. The awfulness that was his father and the thoughts of the young Burroughs makes this book memorable and powerful. I found this passage particularly poignant. When Burrough's was five years old, he went to Mexico with his mother. He meets a man and writes: "But he adored me and I knew it. This was a new, euphoric sensation. My first taste of a drug. I wanted more." By the author of the award winning book, Harmonious Environment: Beautify, Detoxify and Energize Your Life, Your Home and Your Planet.

Please make him stop.....:
Someone please stop this guy - read a memoir of someone who actually accomplished something. The Salon.com review says it best: Burroughs' work, on the other hand, resembles less a mosaic construction than a coughed-up hairball: It's gross, primitive and smacks of something that needed to be released for the creator's own health, but really shouldn't have been shared with others. As dismal as his writing is as memoir, it would make for unforgivably awful, boring fiction that no one would bother to read, much less recommend. And more.... Burroughs' editor at St. Martin's Press and literary agent (both of whom are listed as defendants) encouraged Burroughs to "sensationalize and exaggerate" in order to have "a more commercially viable 'true story' to market to the book-buying public," or the Washington Post: Washington Post, "If you insist on reading "Dry" -- and for the life of me I cannot imagine why you would -- read it as a novel. If you do that, you're going to end up thinking: 'So what? '" The same has to be said of "Scissors."

Hard to read, impossible to put down:
It is true that this book may have been therapeutic for the author, I somehow doubt that it has eased his pain. This books captures the essence of mental abuse --- from the subtlest nuances to the most blatant whacks of a psychological hammer. Mr. Burroughs is an incredible writer; he captures our most complex human experiences in the turn of a phrase or an artful metaphor with a clarity second to none I've read in a long while.