| America's Dumbest Criminals: Wild and Weird Stories of Fumbling Felons, Clumsy Crooks, and Ridiculous Robbers | 
 enlarge | Authors: Daniel Butler, Leland Gregory, Alan Ray
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Category: Book
List Price: $8.99
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You Save: $8.98 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 321215
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 238
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 1558533729
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1092273
EAN: 9781558533721
ASIN: 1558533729
Publication Date: October 1, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: A tradition of southern quality and service. All books guaranteed at the Atlanta Book Company.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 13 | | NEXT » |
 AMERICA'S DUMBEST CRIMINALS--smart and funny August 20, 2008
AMERICAN'S DUMBEST CRIMINALS. . . is laugh aloud funny! It's a great book to pick up when you have only a short time to read! It was the perfect gift for my husband's birthday; good for me, too, as I read it over his shoulder.
stupid laughter! October 2, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Americas dumbest criminals is full of stupid laughter!It has a bunch of little stories put together in one book!One of my favorite ones is about a guy that goes into a bank and tries to rob it but the bank calls the police and the guy starts running away from the police but they still caught him because he was robbing the bank at night and he was wearing light up shoes so the police could see him running!
 Lame March 31, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Perhaps the problem is in the presentation. Stories like these are better told by a witty reporter than printed in a book. While many of the stories were entertaining, I felt like many of them fell flat. Some of the stories were mere coincidences that lacked humor. Others just did not seem to fit under the title of the book. An undercover cop suckering a drug dealer is only amusing so many times.
I did gain some enjoyment from this book. Because many of the stories are based in the Chicago area, the proximity made that stories more relevant to me. Aside from these stories, I could have lived without this book.
Hilarious!!!! September 29, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I never cease to be amazed by how stupid some people can be. These stories literally had me laughing so hard that I dropped the book on the floor. I've read several different collections about dumb criminals but this one is by far the best. This book had me cracking up. If you have not yet read this book, pick up a copy because it is well worth it!
 Obsolete and objectionable April 16, 2005
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
This book delivers what it promises, but I'm not sure that it promises anything special.
It is essentially a collection of humorous cop stories, told to the authors by policemen who, by dint of their occupation, always seem to have an amusing anecdote or two.
Most of the 100 stories are amusing, a few are very funny, and a fair number just fall flat. While browsing through this book is good for a chuckle, I think you could probably get the same exact chuckle by browsing through the internet for similar subject matter.
Even though this is a light-hearted book that is more concerned with entertaining the reader than making a statement, I still couldn't help but be bothered by the politics of the authors, and even more so by the brashness with which they assert those politics.
The introduction relates an anecdote about the authors trying to get the members of a police station to work with them. They explain to the police chief that they think that criminals are glorified in shows like COPS. I had to reread this to make sure I had understood it correctly. COPS glamorizes criminals? In my experience, COPS usually makes criminals look subhuman. Anyhow, the police chief agrees to work with the authors on the condition that they make the criminals look like "coldhearted dumbasses," and show the police force as being "professional at all times." I was shocked to hear that the authors were basically agreeing to cover up any professional misconduct they encountered, and to make the criminals look as bad as possible. And they were bragging about this bargain in the introduction!
Looked at in this light, some of the stories seem a little sinister. The last one in the book tells about an escaped convict who was attempting to hide from a search party. The convict mistakenly thinks he is backing into a hog-shed, when in reality he is backing through a single wall, and the surrounding policemen come up on his rear end poking into the air, with the convict apparently thinking he is hidden from view. There's a quote from a cop that says they "didn't know whether to turn the dogs loose on him, read him his rights, or just give him a good swift kick." Supposedly, they read him his rights, but given the deal that the authors made in the beginning, why should the reader assume that the man wasn't subjected to either of the other two (highly illegal) options?
This is just one of many examples of the "punchline" being that an apprehended suspect gets physically hurt in some way. In one case, after a man (nonviolent offender) is taken into custody and handcuffed, a couple of dogs attack him, biting him several times before the arresting officer could drive the dogs off. The authors write that this is a stellar example of taking a bite out of crime. Har he har har!
Joking about physically abusing a prisoner just isn't that funny to me, and it would be even less funny to the people who are facing long jail terms as a result of their crimes. Just because a person has been convicted of a crime and is paying the price doesn't mean that they deserve our ridicule, especially not mean-spirited ridicule that is specifically designed to make them look like coldhearted dumbasses.
Those political objections aside, this book is somewhat amusing to flip through, but as I said, you could find the same type of material on the web for free.
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