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The Big Con:the Story Of the Confidence Man
[Paperback - 1999]
luc sante
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List Price: $17.95
Our Price: Rs.3145 Rs.2673
Standard Discount: 15%
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Category: Law
Sub-category: Criminology
Additional Category: True Crime
Publisher: Anchor | ISBN: 9780385495387 | Pages: 336
Shipping Weight: .272 | Dimensions: 5.2 x .76 x 7.92 inches

Description

The classic 1940 study of con men and con games that Luc Sante in Salon called “a bonanza of wild but credible stories, told concisely with deadpan humor, as sly and rich in atmosphere as anything this side of Mark Twain.”
 
“Of all the grifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat,” wrote David Maurer, a proposition he definitely proved in The Big Con, one of the most colorful, well-researched, and entertaining works of criminology ever written. A professor of linguistics who specialized in underworld argot, Maurer won the trust of hundreds of swindlers, who let him in on not simply their language but their folkways and the astonishingly complex and elaborate schemes whereby unsuspecting marks, hooked by their own greed and dishonesty, were “taken off” – i.e. cheated—of thousands upon thousands of dollars.
 
The Big Con is a treasure trove of American lingo (the write, the rag, the payoff, ropers, shills, the cold poke, the convincer, to put on the send) and indelible characters (Yellow Kid Weil, Barney the Patch, the Seldom Seen Kid, Limehouse Chappie, Larry the Lug). It served as the source for the Oscar-winning film The Sting.

About the Author

David Warren Maurer was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972, and an author of numerous studies of the language of the American underworld.Maurer received a doctorate from the Ohio State University in Comparative Literature in 1935. He spent much of his academic career studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, and other marginal subcultures. He died on his farm outside Louisville from a self-inflicted gunshot wound."The Big Con" is Maurer's most popular and perhaps most important book. It was originally published in 1940 by Bobbs-Merrill. The source material for it came from Maurer corresponding, interviewing, and informally chatting with hundreds of underworld denizens during the 1930s. Among the interviewed criminals were such figures as Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, Charles Gondorff and Limehouse Chappie. Maurer won the trust of hundreds of grifters, who let him in on their language and their methods. The book served as a source for the film "The Sting".Maurer wrote three other books, "Narcotics and Narcotic Addiction", "Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Pattern", and "Kentucky Moonshine". In all these books, Maurer described the language — mostly the lexicon — of the people living in these "subcultures." For example, in the last book he focused on the craft of the moonshiners, discussed their infiltration of "dry" counties and reported their terminology. "Language of the Underworld" is a collection of several of his previous published articles collected by two of his students. It includes an introduction that describes the methods he used to collect criminal argot.

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