Not all con artists get into the business for money; Frank William Abagnale Jr. set his sights on a different goal: women. At age 16, he swindled his dad out of thousands of dollars simply to buy pretty things for robust women. His first victim was kind enough to let it go, but Abagnale had tasted freedom and wasn’t about to let it go. Within a few years, he had altered his driver's license to age himself by 10 years, acquired a Pan Am Airlines uniform and forged ID cards to obtain free flights around the country, had secured a position as the overnight supervising doctor in a university hospital emergency room, had taken and passed the bar exam without going to law school, and wrote millions of dollars in fraudulent personal - then later, business - checks all to impress the many women he courted. By final the time he was caught (he escaped captivity multiple times), Abagnale had forged over 2.5 million dollars in checks and was known to police in over 26 countries before his 21st birthday.
The book Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake reminisces about the adventures of Frank William Abagnale Jr. through his own vivid descriptions. Overall, the autobiography is well written but not well structured. It focuses mainly on Abagnale’s motives behind his actions (women) and his methods of accomplishment (deception of the highest degree), but lacks enough variation in writing style to keep the reader entertained. The descriptions of events are not “bland” or “monotonous” by any means; the descriptions are simply repetitive, making it all too easy for the reader to get lost in the timeline of events. I know that once I had finished the book, I had to find and read a summary to keep the order of events straight in my head.
With that being said, the detail within individual events is pristine and captivatingly clear. For example: approximately halfway through the biography (page 131 if you are reading the same version of the book I did), Abagnale describes how he avoided being caught writing false checks by printing specific routing numbers. He goes on to describe how each pair of digits represents a specific amount of detailed information, and by altering the first two numerals, one can send a phony check across the country to be verified (and consequently rejected) by the banking district as far from his location as possible. Because the bounced checks went farther in their travels, it took longer for them to return to the original location, giving Abagnale sufficient time to write more fraudulent checks and leave the region before being caught. This attention to detail - while somewhat tedious - does provide great visuals for the reader to conceptualize how Abagnale got away with so many illegal actions.
This book is not meant to be read over an extended period of time. I would recommend reading Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake only if you have two or three days to sit and do nothing but read. If you take any more time than that, the details begin to blend together and the story loses its sense of continuity.
The book Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake reminisces about the adventures of Frank William Abagnale Jr. through his own vivid descriptions. Overall, the autobiography is well written but not well structured. It focuses mainly on Abagnale’s motives behind his actions (women) and his methods of accomplishment (deception of the highest degree), but lacks enough variation in writing style to keep the reader entertained. The descriptions of events are not “bland” or “monotonous” by any means; the descriptions are simply repetitive, making it all too easy for the reader to get lost in the timeline of events. I know that once I had finished the book, I had to find and read a summary to keep the order of events straight in my head.
With that being said, the detail within individual events is pristine and captivatingly clear. For example: approximately halfway through the biography (page 131 if you are reading the same version of the book I did), Abagnale describes how he avoided being caught writing false checks by printing specific routing numbers. He goes on to describe how each pair of digits represents a specific amount of detailed information, and by altering the first two numerals, one can send a phony check across the country to be verified (and consequently rejected) by the banking district as far from his location as possible. Because the bounced checks went farther in their travels, it took longer for them to return to the original location, giving Abagnale sufficient time to write more fraudulent checks and leave the region before being caught. This attention to detail - while somewhat tedious - does provide great visuals for the reader to conceptualize how Abagnale got away with so many illegal actions.
This book is not meant to be read over an extended period of time. I would recommend reading Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake only if you have two or three days to sit and do nothing but read. If you take any more time than that, the details begin to blend together and the story loses its sense of continuity.