Don't Get Too Comfortable

David Rakoff's Don't Get Too Comfortable isn't quite the profoundly illuminating journey into the heart of American cultural and spiritual emptiness advertised on its dust cover. But the book's collected essays, which are brisk, bright, and rendered with a journalist's eye for detail, are funny and subversive. And Rakoff, Canadian-born and a naturalized American, is occasionally profound, never more so than when he ponders the motives of those who elect to go under a plastic surgeon's knife: "It must be murder to be an aging beauty, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone's eyes focus upon you. And then shift away." That's gooseflesh-good writing, even though cosmetic enhancement--or life as a hotel worker or flying on the Concorde or being gay in a hetero world, all experiences in Rakoff's canon here--isn't distinctly American. (We'll grant him flying Hooters Air, though.) In short, goodies aplenty beckon as Rakoff, wit at the ready and cynicism turned up to 11, invites us to sneer at pomposity, hubris, and plain old human stupidity. Where's the queue? --Kim Hughes