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Art of Darkness: Ingenious Performances by Undercover Operators, Con Men, and Others |
Customer Rating: 
Sales Rank: 179796
Available from Amazon |
$15.12 |
Just like Scheherazade, undercover agents talk to save their lives. Only if they put in a poor performance, they don t see the curtain rise again. Art of Darkness pries open the virtuoso identity techniques practiced by undercover operatives, fugitives, disguise artists, pranksters, con artists, and federally protected witnesses. It draws on original interviews with undercover operators in order to show how identity artists on both sides of the law obtain fake ID, develop a disguise, build a cover story, maintain believability in street performances, and deal with threats to their identities all without formal acting training. Art of Darkness inhabits the grey areas of morality as it exposes identity roleplays at the borders of lawfulness. In it you ll find stories of: law-enforcement workers who adopt the techniques of criminals in order to catch them but somehow get caught up in their own trick identities; self-defined artists whose work also has a criminal dimension; criminal informants who masterfully play sides and roles against each other; and hoaxsters and impersonators who may perform trick identities primarily for gain but do so with tremendous inventiveness and a directorial consciousness. This book may explode any remaining notion you harbor that you are not at some level a member of the intelligence community, discerning who is for real and who is presenting a self for personal gain.
(A Word to the Wise: This review was of a pre-publication version. The final draft, I understand from the author, is a bit more approachable for the casual reader.)
At first glance, the title ART OF DARKNESS is enigmatic. Is this about the dark side of sorcery's magic? Or perhaps an examination of a new school of painting? Or a coffee table book featuring the imagery of nighttime shadows? No to all, but rather it's a learned treatise by Sara Schneider on the creation and exercise of false identities by con men and undercover cops.
I perceived at least five principal subtopics to the overall theme: the personality type that lends itself to the assumption of a false identity, the props, e.g. documents and disguises, that support such, the mechanics of the con-mark interaction, circumstances which cause an undercover cop to go "bad" or a criminal to go "good", i.e. become an informant, and the means by which a false identity can be salvaged if its breakdown appears imminent.
In the perfect reading experience, I'm both diverted and educated. Both elements may otherwise be present or not. An example of a book that's entertaining but not instructive would be, say, any one of the Jack Reacher thrillers by Lee Child, e.g. the excellent Bad Luck and Trouble (Jack Reacher). Three books that pleased immensely on both levels were A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Roving Mars by Steve Squyres, and Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Alternatively, I found Schneider's esoteric ART OF DARKNESS to be commendably learned, but not consistently regaling. While certainly not impenetrable to the literate, the text requires the reader's close attention. An example of the narrative's more or less general tone follows:
"Every seamless roleplay, whatever its combination of simulation and dissimulation techniques, takes as its model the practices of passing, wherein member of one group (usually of low status) attempt to be known and accepted in practice as members of a higher-level status group. Goffman identified a 'cycle of passing', in which the passer moves first toward expanding consciousness of his act, then toward increasing planfulness, and finally toward total pervasiveness of his passing identity in his life. This journey describes the parallel motion of the passer's subjective sense of him or herself within a new social role and the achieved level of external success demonstrated by passing within that role ..."
Mind you, the book sometimes inspires an enthusiastic "Cool!":
"The term 'mark'- as it refers to the victim of a confidence scheme - derives from the circus con practice of literally marking those who had either already been taken or demonstrated the signs that they could be. On adults deemed ripe for carnival swindles, the placement of the chalk mark indicated where its bearer carried his money."
I suggest that ART OF DARKNESS be required reading for a behavioral psychology class, or for law enforcement officers considering training and assignment as undercover operatives, or perhaps even for those enrolled in a school of acting. These audiences might very well award five stars. However, as a volume for the casual reader to pull off the shelf, I give it four stars, and then only if one is drawn to the fictional or non-fictional careers of scam artists, undercover cops, or behind-the-lines spies.
Finally, ART OF DARKNESS should serve as a reminder that we all play different roles in our daily lives. Imagine projecting the same persona on a job interview, first date, or in front of the traffic court judge that you'd exhibit with your beer drinking buds at a Super Bowl party, i.e. boorish, or over the breakfast table with your spouse of twenty years, i.e. boring. As Sara writes:
"The real identity game is neither about the individual body nor the solo self. Rather, it is socially constructed, embedded in the interplay between my perceptions and yours of what I might be, between the shape of the nest you make for my identity project and the one I make for yours. Identity play, this book argues, takes place not in the self, but in the scene."
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