Some essays I loved and a couple I was less compelled by. That said, all of David Rakoff's words make me sad that we have a finite amount left to consume in this world. I suppose that is the way for all words, but with David Rakoff's I feel lucky every time I get to experience every little symbol, every relic that is evidence of his existence. Listening to the audiobook of this essay collection, his singular, sardonic humor made him feel simultaneously terribly alive and painfully absent. In his words,"What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories, procedural and depopulated. It's as if a neutron bomb went off and all you're left with are hospital corridors where you're scanning the walls for familiar photographs. Sometimes in the absence of emotion, your only recourse is to surround yourself with objects. The symbol, the relics about you. Wagner was wrong when he said joy is not in things, it is in us. One can find joy in things, but it is a particular kind of joy. The joy of corroboration..." Isn't it wonderful that his words, finite though they may be, are anything but procedural or depopulated? They elicit the pure and brutal delight of life corroborated.

This book was really tough to get through, I did not find the humor in these stories at all. The authors voice felt really pretentious to me. I was mildly amused by a couple stories, but that was it.

The unrelenting sourness can be hard to withstand at times, but how can you say no to a man who spent his time at the Aspen Comedy Festival "wheezing like a mid-coitus Nelson Rockefeller"?

Lovely short story book very reminiscent of early 2000 a time in my life where I was just as absurd as many of the stories in the book. By far my favorite story is Christmas Freud, in fact I listen to it from This American Life in his voice and background music but reading along the book. Magical! A perfect mix of satire, smart dialogue, and the comedy we all know from authors like David Sedaris.

Essays from a journalist's excursions and experiences. My favorite was his tale of hiking Mt. Manadnock in Keene on Christmas (he was wildly unprepared). Very amusing, but the atheistic view made me a bit sad. Loved his descriptions of the desolate landscape of Iceland.

David Rakoff's collection is something in the middle: it's not a laugh a minute but it provides a few laugh out loud moments. Fraud is light clever humor for the bus or train. The subjects range from working on a kibbutz as a teen or travelling into New England small towns to hike up a small mountain.

What stuck me is how different Fraud is from his other work that I read, Don't Get Too Comfortable. In that book, Rakoff explored the ridiculousness and vulgarity of life in the upper crusts of society. Those essays were funny, but also explored a compelling subject and served as biting social commentary. Throughout Don't Get Too Comfortable, you're asking yourself, "How did things get like this? What's wrong with this picture?" In Fraud, there aren't any morals or insights into Rakoff's life that can be picked apart at the end of each essay. After each one, the most I got out of it was, "Oh, that was a funny (or not) story about a time when he did something or went somewhere that wasn't Manhatten." The subject here, if there is one, is that Rakoff simple isn't cut out for much except living in NYC. These essays just aren't particularly moving. Being an outsider or a fake should make for good fodder; it's an universally shared feeling. Yet something falls flat with Fraud.

I wanted to like this book. I normally enjoy Rakoff's dark humor. But there was just nothing that caught me in this collection. Almost nothing I will remember and recall. I'm disappointed and confused; what went wrong?

I first heard of David Rakoff after his death. An interview he had with Terry Gross was played in his memory on Fresh Air. It was an intriguing interview where he talked about the loss of his arm and at that time was hopeful that his cancer was not progressing. His way of speaking made me want to read his books and I'm so glad to have started with Fraud.

Fraud is a collection of Essays David wrote. Each one is fun and tells a story from a looking back perspective. You will laugh frequently while reading his witty descriptions and self deprecating analysis.

My favorite is "Tokyo Story". This is an emotional journey for him, revisiting Japan where he first discovered he had cancer. He had been there in 1986-87 and had his shortest job ever working 12 hours for an advertising firm that was starting a "computer network". Remember this is 1986 and so the internet and computers are not really heard of. This is his first time EVER using a mouse (utter mayhem!). At the end of the day he leaves thinking...

"Walking out of that office, as buoyant as someone who's had his Titanic reservations canceled I said to myself Sayonara suckers. Good luck with your "network"."

Hilarious!

I was lucky enough to meet David Rakoff when I hosted him for a bookstore reading. Along with David Sedaris & Sarah Vowell, he was on an NPR speaking tour. He is definitely as entertaining as the aforementioned authors; seeing the 3 of them in a group reading was a highlight of my literary life.
His essays could best be characterized as lefty whining, but with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Hard to pick just one favorite in this collection, but the Steven Segal/Buddhist workshop piece is pretty great.
He is deadpan, hilarious, and a great reader. His years as a soap opera actor have served him well!
Bonus points for the illustrations of the author's own woodcuts.

David Rakoff is so caustic and witty and hard as a diamond. But there's also a deeply human side to his work. The essay about his socialist youth is particularly powerful. This is really worth a read.

I wish that I liked this book more than I did. I knew Rackoff from his stories on This American Life and always enjoyed him there. From the first essay, I thought I would enjoy all of this book. Sadly, I was disappointed. While it had very funny and thought-provoking portions, much of it was a pure dud for me. I skipped more pages than I would care to admit. Some of the essays were just dull and uninteresting. There were several, however, that were really very good- funny, soul-searching and meaningful. I just wish there weren't so many duds in between.

As much as I love a collection of nonfiction essays, I found it hard to get through this once. Rakoff’s voice was just a little too snobby for me, it felt like his sarcasm was undercut by a true desire to throw off his reader and belittle them. The final call to action maybe have panged me slight, and i definitely cracked a smile or too throughout, i wasn’t in love with his style and found his stories to be more explanatory than emotionally connected to himself.