Educational, entertaining; intended for starter detectives but ideal for anyone interested in the minutia of modern...
Thomson’s debut work of nonfiction—part memoir, part guidebook—provides “the nitty-gritty of worker’s compensation insurance investigations.”
The author, a licensed private investigator, worked primarily for the Insurance Company of Southern California on suspected insurance fraud cases. His beat spanned from Modesto to Capistrano. His tools were both traditional gumshoe and high-tech, the essential components of what’s known in his industry as “sub rosa,” or covert, surveillance. Over a decadeslong career, which Thomson admits was low paying and “often humdrum,” the author recounts covering wrongful death assignments and scoping out cheating spouses. Sometimes, worker’s compensation insurance cases had their own unique and interesting twists; Thomson shares a memorable one in the short chapter “The Woman with Two Claims.” He examines the advances in surveillance equipment since the 1980s but notes that nothing works better than patience, a featureless car with good fuel economy and the ability to make quick U-turns, and old-fashioned note taking. Aside from being crucial to fact-finding, investigative notes serve as the raw material for requisite written reports. The author’s experiences as a process server helped him learn how to keep dogs at bay and navigate large apartment complexes. Thomson shares many small tips, some obvious, some subtle, on the legalities regarding privacy, as well as the importance of notifying local police of stakeouts and how to control the unprofessional and distracting “jiggle” that can mar clandestine camerawork. To identify the right person at an address, he suggests a unique method of mailing a large, bright envelope or a teddy bear, anything innocuous but easily spotted from afar, to establish the intended “claimant.” At times, Thomson’s writing reads as a dry surveillance report, but when he wanders into the shaky area of “pretext” and expresses his thoughts on running red lights or relieving oneself on stakeout, the peculiarity of his voice can be engaging.
Educational, entertaining; intended for starter detectives but ideal for anyone interested in the minutia of modern investigative work.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479781591
Page Count: 76
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.
A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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