Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake Paperback – August 1, 2000

Fast moving. True story of the great imposter who i find myself cheering on instead of wanting to get caught.

He was indeed a pretty smooth criminal in the truest sense of the word. He seems to offer this story in a voice that was apparently playing inside his head at the time, which is an ironic, self-serving and despicable voice. It's a voice that allowed him to rationalize anything that stood in his way of living a unique criminal life.My curiosity was aroused to read this book after I have seen the movie a while back. Having read the entire book, I can say with absolute certainty that the movie doesn't even scratch the surface.Regardless of how much former criminals like Frank claim they changed, it is always best to take their version of the story with a grain of salt. After all, Frank even made a promise in tears to the judge who saved his life in Sweden and then broke his word on the way back home. The judge in Sweden single-handedly saved his life when it was on the line and gave him a second chance to make a new beginning.However, I will give him credit though for going into great detail about how he went about planning and executing his tricks on his victims. I was assuming that he would just barely touch upon those things and not disclose his entire game plan in such great detail. What is also so remarkably unique and interesting about Frank is that he did it all by himself. And he was incredibly young!I couldn't possibly end this brief comment without mentioning the unbelievably inhumane treatment he got in prison that he was thrown in while he was in France. The treatment Frank got while serving his sentence in France reminded me of the death camps in Nazi Germany. He was forced to survive in utter darkness in an incredibly tiny prison on his own with no clothes and was not even given anything to eat on some days. It's hard to fathom that prison conditions and the treatment the prisoners got in France could be so disgustingly inhumane at the time. It's a miracle that Frank made it out alive.

Loved the movie but the narrator has a very witty and distinct style of recounting his adventures. Even if you saw the movie this is worth a read for that alone!

My copy of this book is through Audible books version. Let me first say that the narration was very well done and with a good pace. I quickly found myself wanting to get back to the story while driving or taking walks. I was familiar with the story line because of the movie, which I always say is perhaps the only DiCaprio movie that I really enjoyed his acting. The book has little to say about the FBI agent assigned to catch him and ended w/o reference to his post-criminal career. In fact, it ends with yet another of his clever means of evading capture.As far as whether all that he wrote, or had written for him, was true is frankly not my concern. It's not like I'm using his ideas for my own life. It doesn't diminish my enjoyment of the book whether he was at serious risk of entering Italian prisons as stated in the book or if he actually had all the sexual escapades. It's a good story and that's really all that's important. What I found most interesting is that while listening, I'm rooting for him to escape and pull off his cons. I don't like criminals, but he was fun. If you are wanting a story that is based on reliable truth or if you abhor criminal behavior, then I wouldn't recommend this book. But if you are just wanting a good and fun read, then Catch Me... remains and thoroughly engrossing book.

The movie fell way short of the actual story in the book. The movie highlighted some of his most amazing scams, but the book also shows how he learned to scam better and more proficient so he could get away with taking mostly banks for even more. He also finally was caught, but the reality was far worse than what was hinted at in the movie. He spent a long time locked in a dungeon in France with guards as the only humans he might see. It was pretty gruesome. The book also covers his problems trying to live a straight life when his record made it almost impossible to get even minimum wage work. How eventually his inside knowledge was what made it possible for him to get paid to give banks seminars about their vulnerabilities, and how that led to a very successful carrier in teaching and changing security in the way security is handled all over the world. All that funny money we all carry...Those were basically his ideas to make money hard to reproduce on high quality printers.This is really a damn good book. I bought his second book thinking it would continue the story from the first book, but it doesn’t do very much of that. His second and subsequent books are all guides for both personal and business securities. Which is good none the less

Take it with a grain of salt. In the book everybody admires him, top professional want to work with him (without a resume, recommendation from a trusted colleague, or having even heard of him before a chance encounter), and beautiful women want to bed him. This is the basic formula that is repeated throughout the book. There was even a part of the story where a random crowd cheered for him. I don’t reckon this type main character energy occurs in real life, only in movie…. and Frank Abagnale’s book.It’s a fun read though, so for that fact alone I would recommend it, but only as fiction.

Daughter needed for summer reading . Came fast and was the book she needed . Great condition.