Burglar’s Guide to the City
Overview: At the core of A Burglar’s Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, up to the buried vaults of banks, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city.
Encompassing nearly two thousand years of heists and break-ins, the book draws on the expertise of reformed bank robbers, FBI special agents, the LAPD air support division, and architects past and present.
While discussing how to pick locks or climb the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum’s surveillance routine or considering home invasions in ancient Rome, a Burglar’s Guide to the City ensures readers will never enter a bank again withut imagining how to loot the vault, or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.
Pages: 296 Pages
Writer: Geoff Manaugh
Recommendations:
This book details many aspects of what it all about to be a burglar. It gives information that real life burglar’s provided, it talks about some of the companies that try to stop burglars as well as the products used to be a burglar. The book also talks about what you would look for in a building that you could exploit. A fair amount of pages is dedicated to LAPD Air Support division. The only real connection to the subject of the book is it gives the author a chance to discuss what happens above Los Angeles. Sure you could have a burglary reported, and the air support would help try to locate the suspect, but so will the ground crews. You also get information on what it is like to pick a lock and how unpractical it is for someone trying to get into your house. Usually they want to get in and out before attracting too much attention, so it would just be easier to smash something like a window. Maybe the most interesting part of the book is when it is going over some of the famous burglars over the course of history. It was interesting to hear how creative they are, and it is not often that you get to read about people that have gotten away with the crime.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. Some of the chapters did seem to get a little long and seemed to start to dart off course, but the author always seemed to dial himself in. I found a lot of the book interesting and plan to follow up with some of the references he lists and will find myself looking deeper at some of the historical content that is mentioned. For the most part, the content is rich and presented in a way that keeps you reading. I did feel that several of the sections really didn’t have much to do with being a burglar, but most of that was to disprove a misconception. A good book that I enjoyed, and I will be reading more content to get more information on topics mentioned.