A Burglar's Guide to the City

Is this book for burglars, or those who fear them? It's a little hard to tell, which is a problem. Another is that it is more a padded blog or magazine piece than an audiobook with a coherent thesis. While much of the material is interesting the first time you hear it, the second and third times tend to pall, as do lists of things like shapes of lockpicks we will never see or care about. Scott Aiello, so good at fiction, here gets in the way as he tries to breathe drama into material that has no emotional content, and overplays any hint of wit or irony, as if he were performing a snarky SNL skit instead of letting the listener hear what's there. B.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

November 9, 2015
Architecture blogger Manaugh (The BLDGBLOG Book) turns the building world inside out in this fascinating view of the modern city as seen through the eyes of a potential burglar. Noting that “burglary requires architecture,” he shows how burglars deconstruct a seemingly stable building environment into a “Matrix space... of dissolving and pop-up entryways through to other worlds.” They not only navigate air ducts, elevator shafts, and rooftops to gain access to interiors, but sometimes turn regulations intended to safeguard buildings into break-in blueprints. Observing that “cities get the type of crime their design calls for,” Manaugh shows how Los Angeles’s freeway system facilitates the “stop-and-rob” bank heists that made it “the bank robbery capital of the world” in the 1990s, and how, in the late ’80s, one enterprising gang of crooks used the city’s storm sewer system to tunnel into a bank vault and nab millions in loot. Manaugh supports his analyses of these weak spots in urban architecture with abundant insights and observations from law enforcement officers, security specialists, and self-identified burglars, and laces the text with thrilling accounts of audacious burglaries. Readers of this illuminating study will never look at the buildings and cities they live in the same way.