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
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of...
Known for his self-deprecating wit and the harmlessly eccentric antics of his family, Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 2000, etc.) can also pinch until it hurts in this collection of autobiographical vignettes.
Once again we are treated to the author’s gift for deadpan humor, especially when poking fun at his family and neighbors. He draws some of the material from his youth, like the portrait of the folks across the street who didn’t own a TV (“What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone?” he wonders) and went trick-or-treating on November first. Or the story of the time his mother, after a fifth snow day in a row, chucked all the Sedaris kids out the door and locked it. To get back in, the older kids devised a plan wherein the youngest, affection-hungry Tiffany, would be hit by a car: “Her eagerness to please is absolute and naked. When we ask her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was ‘Where?’ ” Some of the tales cover more recent incidents, such as his sister’s retrieval of a turkey from a garbage can; when Sedaris beards her about it, she responds, “Listen to you. If it didn’t come from Balducci’s, if it wasn’t raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.” But family members’ square-peggedness is more than a little pathetic, and the fact that they are fodder for his stories doesn’t sit easy with Sedaris. He’ll quip, “Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorrow—it’s not like you're going to do anything with it,” as guilt pokes its nose around the corner of the page. Then he’ll hitch himself up and lacerate them once again, but not without affection even when the sting is strongest. Besides, his favorite target is himself: his obsessive-compulsiveness and his own membership in this company of oddfellows.
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of both.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-14346-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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