The biggest problem I had with this book is the doggerel verse form that Rakoff chose is a form that just isn't well suited for long form interconnected narratives on serious topics. Case in point is found on the audio book -- Rakoff created a character who was toasting her sister at a wedding and purposely rhymed her toast rhyming sister and blister and not paying attention to how the line scanned. This "rhyme within a rhyme" was funny and quite hysterical. At the end of the audio book, Rakoff and Ira Glass fool around and read other lines from the poem in the sister's "voice" and it is quite funny. And that is the problem -- the stories are serious and the form is comic. Maybe it works in some sort of tragic-comic way, but for the attempt at wide ranging depth, I couldn't help but think of Spoon River Anthology which sort of did the same thing, but without all the rhyming and in the end was more powerful. Also, the scenarios Rakoff picked from rape, the Chicago slaughterhouse, and the Aids crisis, all seemed rather NPR cliched.