Tom Bentley
Auteur de Avanaux (The Prosperine Trilogy Book 1)
Œuvres de Tom Bentley
Avanaux (The Prosperine Trilogy Book 1) (2015) — Directeur de publication — 20 exemplaires, 1 critique
Empires of remorse : narrative, postcolonialism and apologies for colonial atrocity (2016) 3 exemplaires
SimIsle: Missions in the Rainforest (User's Manual) 1 exemplaire
A-Train User Manual 1 exemplaire
A-Train Construction Set 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
Author in Progress: A No-Holds-Barred Guide to What It Really Takes to Get Published (2016) — Contributeur — 64 exemplaires, 1 critique
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Sexe
- male
Membres
Critiques
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 19
- Aussi par
- 1
- Membres
- 59
- Popularité
- #280,813
- Évaluation
- 4.0
- Critiques
- 2
- ISBN
- 35
- Langues
- 1
With a moral compass on the blink and a never ending need for candy, Tom took to using his ‘five fingered discount’ to satiate his sugar craving and very soon escalated to stealing anything he wanted or could sell to his school friends.
Bentley takes his ‘skills’ on the road and causes havoc from California, Las Vegas and Washington then across the border to Canada.
What starts with the pilfering of confectionary quickly gets more serious when he and his cronies start lifting gasoline from parked cars using a homemade pumping device and eventually to stealing carburettors.
Tom’s methods vary from the downright sneaky with hidden pockets in his jacket, to the much more brazen dribbling of a basketball out of a store.
Not deterred by a short stint in the police cells when he underestimated the observation skills of an undercover security guard, Tom embarks on a drug filled kleptomaniacal road trip with a succession of friends as he seeks to make sense of his teenage years.
Subsidising his trips with short term jobs as a mechanic on an oil refinery, an apple picker and ironically as a shop assistant Bentley regales the reader with a series of tales that both shock and entertain in equal measure.
Years later, the author realises the error of his ways during his teens and uses this platform to explain why he did what he did and to show a bit of remorse for the more serious acts he perpetrated.
Written in an easy style and with great descriptions of the times and places the Tom inhabited, this is a fun delve into the past for those of us of a certain age and a voyage of discovery for those who don’t remember the 60’s and 70’s.
Despite the seriousness of some of the author’s antics, you can’t help but get attached to him as the account of the period unfolds and it is nice to see that the repentance is real and not just there for the title by-line.
A thoroughly entertaining tale that gives a snapshot of times past, when things were very different to what they are today. As someone much more intelligent than me once said ‘The past is a foreign country’ and you wouldn’t imagine any of this to be possible in our modern era especially with CCTV, barcodes and security tags.
In summary, if this were fiction it would be a great story but with it being true it adds that extra edge that sometimes leaves the reader going ‘you did WHAT!’ For me this was a fun and entertaining biographical look at the author’s late teens and I would recommend it to anyone… (plus d'informations)