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Loading... Don't Get Too Comfortableby David Rakoff
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  chicamimi | Oct 18, 2009 |  Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems by David Rakoff (2006)  cdp02005 | Aug 4, 2009 | Not that funny. I listened to half. (  ) leeinaustin | Jul 19, 2008 | okay Kaethe | May 23, 2008 | Many reviewers have aptly compared this book to essays by David Sedaris. Sadly, these essays are not as funny as those by Sedaris. Though Rakoff sometimes tackles more serious topics than Sedaris, overall I was disappointed by these essays. The writing was good, the book was funny, but it didn't live up to the high bar set by Sedaris. Too many of the essays felt like set ups: he went to the Midnight Madness game night just so he could write it up; he went to the Brooklyn food foraging event just for an essay, etc. That might be okay if the resulting essay was really funny. But when the resulting essay is, "Eh, so the event wasn't that much fun. Or maybe I'm just the anti-fun..." it comes off as whining rather than amusing. (  ) msjoanna | May 11, 2008 | 
 It's a terrific idea for a book, perfectly suited for a self-indulgent and self-analytical generation, and Rakoff has some stinging things to say. But there's no getting around the fact that, at heart, this is more a collection of vaguely related magazine pieces (much of the material here has already appeared in places like Details, Harper's Bazaar, Seed and GQ, and on public radio's "This American Life," where Rakoff is a regular) than a coherent seriocomic manifesto.
References to this work on external resources.
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| Book description |
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David Rakoff’s bestselling collection of autobiographical essays, Fraud, established him as one of today’s funniest and most insightful writers. Now, in Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff moves from the personal to the public, journeying into the land of unchecked plenty that is contemporary America. Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily skewered.
Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism; our manic getting and spending have now become celebrated as moral virtues. Whether contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good-times-and-chicken-wings populism of Hooters Air, working as a cabana boy at a South Beach hotel, or traveling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core video shoot—where he is provided with his very own personal manservant—Rakoff takes us on a bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess. He comes away from his explorations hilariously horrified.
At once a Wildean satire of our ridiculous culture of overconsumption and a plea for a little human decency, Don’t Get Too Comfortable shows that far from being bobos in paradise, we’re in a special circle of gilded-age hell.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400)
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If someone were looking for essays to read, I'd probably recommend Fraud first, but I wouldn't tell someone not to read this. I guess that's about as critical as I can get on this one. (