Catch Me If You Can: The true story of a real fake

I finished my June read really quickly which is a really good thing with the week I'm about to have! I really enjoyed it. I'm sure part of it was due to my soft spot for stories about people on the "other side of the law". I could never be a thief or a con-man (woman...) but it sure is fun to think about sometimes, if only for the cleverness behind the thefts and cons.

After I finished reading this, I was watching a movie about quantum physics (yes, really) and how it can positively influence our lives and came across something that tied back into the book for me. Just as we can be addicted to outside drugs, our body releases chemicals that coincide with certain emotions. Sometimes we get addicted to certain emotions! Pessimism, anger, sexual drive, depression...your cells develop receptors for the neural peptides emitted by certain emotions and will shove other emotions out of the way if that's the main emotion they continue to receive. SO...in Frank Abagnale's case -- and I had thought about this before as I read -- he was addicted, addicted to the rush, the thrill of a clever ruse, and maybe most of all addicted to the women. He never drank, smoke, or did drugs but was addicted to women.

I don't say by any means that that excuses his behavior, but it was certainly interesting to think about.

I also found myself appalled at the French prison system, which is the same today as it was then! For six months he lived in a cell with no light, no bedding, no clothes, and only a bucket for a toilet (which was only emptied periodically). I was SO disgusted and felt glad that we don't do that....BUT -- by the end of the book I changed my mind quite a bit! There's a Q&A with Frank at the end of the book and he is asked if he thinks France's prison system is preferable to America's.

"The French prisons will never change, but the older I get, the wiser I get. Maybe the French have the best system. They believe that when you commit a crime, you are punished. You are reomved from society and its privileges. You are confined. It is not a comfortable living environment. It's not meant to be. They don't want you to come back. They would never provide air conditioning, TV, weight lifting, and great food (even if they are French). In the United States we currently spend over twenty-five thousand dollars a year to house an inmate. Most are living in confinement better than a lot of honest people living in a free society who have not broken any laws."

After hearing that, I had to agree! I don't feel like we need to have prisons as drastic as the French prisons but I think we would certainly benefit if we took a page from their book and made our prisons less comfortable and worked harder to reform the inmates that were there! But then that of course brings up questions of how that would be done without taking a MORAL stand, because heaven forbid we actually SAY there's a RIGHT WAY, that there's a RIGHT and a WRONG which we could actually teach without teaching specific religion. Not enough people in the right places believe that yet.

He also said that what he did thirty years ago in his youth is TWO HUNDRED times easier to do today! Yikes!!

So all in all I felt like it was a great read! I loved that as I was reading, I could just read for pleasure and enjoy the story. But I also loved that the Q&A at the end of the book got me thinking about some of the bigger questions his story brings up!