A Burglar's Guide to the City

At its best, this book is a fascinating flight through the skies of L.A. and scamper through the tunnels below, a cops-and-robbers tale that informs us of the tricks of both trades.

Dampening the action is that the author is as earnest as a puppy; whomever he's sitting next to is his best friend, whether that's a former burglar, a master lock picker, or the LAPD. He repeats police propaganda unflinchingly, but later carries lock picks and handcuffs into a bank and worries he may get caught with them.

We learn about capers through sewers, into rivers, underneath banks and slicing through museums. We meet a burglar who builds himself a Spider-Man themed hideout inside a Toys 'R Us.

In the end his in-laws are burglarized, and The Burglar falls from a perch of "master of misuse of the built environment" to lazy teenage punks.

The tales are thrilling, if you can jam your internal GPS and just go where he takes you.

I've always been a fan of Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG, which is only nominally a study of architecture through strange lenses. (One of the first posts as I write this looks at an art study of the bacteria on money and how it travels through society and compares to seeds being transmitted through ancient boat ballast.)

And who doesn't love burglary and heist movies - I'm in it for the naughtiness of penetrating forbidden places and urban exploration.

This book is a loving review of how architecture affects burglary, how burglary affects architecture, how the architecture of a city affects the burglary and then affects how policing responds. The helicopter patrols of L.A. sprawl are a response just as the vertical patrols of giant housing projects reflect their own landscapes.

We delve into locks, lockpicking, escaping, getaways, tunnels through earth, air, traffic, and buildings themselves.

At the end is the sobering reflection that all of this is only interesting as the edges of burglary, the mythical kind of burglary. Real burglary is too often full of ugly nastiness, destruction and damage to the lives of those burgled.

I really enjoyed the discussions on Nakatomi space and turning on burglar eyes to see architecture in a different way - it's an easy read and I'd recommend it.