A Burglar's Guide to the City

Geoff Manaugh

Apr 2016 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Scott Aiello

About this audiobook

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. 

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.

     With the help of FBI Special Agents, reformed bank robbers, private security consultants, the LAPD. Air Support Division, and architects past and present, the book dissects the built environment from both sides of the law. Whether picking padlocks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum's surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, A Burglar's Guide to the City has the tools, the tales, and the x-ray vision you need to see architecture as nothing more than an obstacle that can be outwitted and undercut.

     Full of real-life heists--both spectacular and absurd--A Burglar's Guide to the City ensures that listeners will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.

Ratings and reviews

Perhaps a more fitting title for Geoff Manaugh's journalistic account of the craft of burglary would be "A Police Apologists Account of the Rise of the Surveillance State."

About the author

GEOFF MANAUGH is the author of BLDGBLOG (bldgblog.com), one of the most acclaimed architecture sites on the web. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New Scientist, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications, including the live-event series Pop-Up Magazine. He has also lectured and taught at design institutions around the world.