9780385510363

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

Whether contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good times and chicken wings of Hooters Air, working as a pool boy at a South Beach hotel, or traveling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core Playboy TV shoot, where he is provided with his very own personal manservant, David Rakoff takes us on a bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess, delving into the manic getting and spending celebrated as moral virtues in David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise. He comes away from his explorations hilariously horrified.

Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism, and Rakoff is there to map that frontier, blasting off into the rarified universe of Paris fashion shows, where an evening dress can cost as much as four years of college. He sits through the grotesqueries of filthy vaudeville in Times Square immediately following 9/11. Twenty days without food allows him to experience firsthand the wonders of "detoxification," and the frozen world of cryonics, whose promise of eternal life is the ultimate status symbol, leaves him very cold indeed (much to our good fortune).

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.

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: Search Results