Rakoff, David 1966(?)-

views updated

RAKOFF, David 1966(?)-

PERSONAL: Born c. 1966, in Canada son of Vivan Rakoff (a psychiatrist) and Gina Shochat-Rakoff (a physician). Education: Columbia University.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Author and journalist.

WRITINGS:

Fraud: Essays, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to National Public Radio's "This American Life." Contributor to periodicals, including Salon.com and Outside.

SIDELIGHTS: "Shish-kebabing the cultural kitsch of this country," in the words of People contributor David Cobb Craig, National Public Radio contributor David Rakoff has covered offbeat assignments like a survivalist training camp, a Buddhism seminar led by film star Steven Seagal, and his experience playing Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in a Christmas window display. In Fraud: Essays Rakoff brings together a number of these reports, adding material that never made it into his radio commentaries. As he told fellow NPR contributor David Sedaris in an interview on Powells.com, "When it's for the page, you're allowed to put back in all the parentheticals, all the tangentials, all the things that you really wanted to say."

Rakoff "writes with verve, irony, and insight," Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman claimed. As a New Yorker who hates to leave the city, and a Jewish, Canadian, gay man, Rakoff reveals himself as the sardonic outsider in many of these pieces, which take him to such settings as a New England hike in the mountains and the Aspen Comedy Festival. For a Book contributor, "Rakoff puts himself in the most uncomfortable situations and finds he is . . . uncomfortable." But even in his beloved Manhattan, as when he recounts his days as a young editorial assistant, Rakoff never seems quite at home.

For some reviewers, this quality of a stranger looking in could become too self-referential. "Unfortunately, Rakoff . . . has a memoirist's tendency to reduce whatever he finds to solipsism," concluded New York Times reviewer Christina Cho. Others, however, noted a quality of empathy beneath the outsider veneer. "Melancholy, opinionated, but tremendously forgiving, Rakoff's writing conveys a quality rarely found in satire: vulnerability," wrote Advocate contributor David Bahr. For Library Journal reviewer Eric Bryant, "Rakoff's real talent, and there is plenty of it on display here, resides in his powers of social and personal analysis in the guise of description."