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

David Rakoff takes us on a bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess. Whether he is 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 shootwhere he is provided with his very own personal manservantrarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly 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. Simultaneously a Wildean satire and a plea for a little human decency,Don't Get Too Comfortableshows that far from being bobos in paradise, we're in a special circle of gilded-age hell.

David Rakoff is a writer-at-large for GQ magazine, and a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and Public Radio International’s This American Life. He has also written for Outside, Vogue, The New York Observer, and Salon, among others. He lives in New York City.


From the Hardcover edition.