Encompassing
nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A
Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal
possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same
way again.
Quotes from the book:
“Architecture is the “magic of four
walls,” he writes, referring to its power to fundamentally transform how
certain crimes are judged and how their perpetrators can be sentenced.”
“For the burglar, every building is infinite, endlessly weaving back
into itself through meshed gears made of fire escapes and secondary stairways,
window frames and screened-in porches, pet doors and ventilation shafts,
everything interpenetrating, everything mixed together in a fantastic knot. Rooms
and halls coil together like dragons inside of dragons or snakes eating their
own tails, rooms opening onto every other room in the city. For the burglar,
doors are everywhere. Where we see locks and alarms, they see M. C. Escher.”
I've been putting this off because there are two types
of reviews that I like to write: those where I loved the book and want to sing
its praises, and those where I really despised it and can't wait to tear it to
pieces. When a book is just mediocre ... well. Who cares? Despite the
cool concept and very neat cover, I’m afraid this is one of the latter.
Like with
many I could say that it's not really the book's fault. It didn't entirely meet
expectations. My idea was that the book would be more fantastical, an
unstoppable wave of analyses of actual burglaries with diagrams and granular
detail on the planning and equipment used and how the cops eventually caught
them etc. Perhaps tales of fraud, etc. Art theft. Diamonds
and gold heists. Secret papers and
spy thriller plots. What an
opportunity.
Sadly there
are few of those expected moments in the book and when they did they felt
flaccid compared with what I imagined would be in there, and instead we’re were
surrounded by unending pages of discussion about the act of going
through a wall instead of a door, or what the legal definition of burglary is,
or anecdotes about riding in a police helicopter in LA and seeing old
television film sets.
I was hoping for a jewellery theft as
per The Pink Panther movies,
perhaps. A daring thief on a retractable
line lowers down to a triggered floor to snatch the booty. Sadly, no.
Instead of creative capers, we get mundane stories about police
ride-alongs and interviews he conducted. This book would better be
titled, "My
experiences researching a book about burglary."
Throughout
there's just too much chatter and analysis and not enough legends and good narrative. A great deal of space,
for instance, is given to the world of hobby lock pickers and the author's own
efforts to learn the skill. At the end of it all he informs us lock picking is
irrelevant because burglars don't bother with picking locks, they force entry
or find other means of getting into a building. Then why include this
information at all?
When actual crimes are mentioned, they
are given brief space and left me wanting more details. It felt as if more time
was spent explaining the fictional plots of films and books than of real-life
crimes.
I really
wanted to give this book a higher rating. I heard Manaugh interviewed on NPR
and was looking forward to the book. It needed to be shorter, by at least a
25%. If it had been, I would have given it 5 stars. The information was
delivered well, it just needed to be tighter. He should shop for a better
editor.
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