Accidentally, on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America

by Ken Dornstein

Book Overview

Accidentally, on Purpose is the first book to document the making of America's most peculiar criminal underworld. Not centered on the traditional activities of organized crime - drug dealing,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312129920
• ISBN13: 9780312129927
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 452 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Please Get a Job

What a bunch of low life criminals. I bought this book as a lark, but came away mad. The energy some people put into getting your money is almost more then if they went out and got a job. This book is basically a history of all the most popular scams and con men in America over the last 200 years. The author must have spent a tremendous amount of time in researching the book because it is very detailed. If there is a scam out there and not in this book then I doubt it made money. The writing is good with an easy to read pace and sentence structure. My only complaint was the amount of detail, at times I got a little tired of hearing about the 5th best guy at the so and so scam. The book could have used a little more aggressive editing. With that said, if you are interested in scams you will get a lot of entertainment out of this book.

The History of Fake Injuries, On Purpose

If you ever want to know how the history of screwing insurance companies came about, this is the book for you. And for some reason I'm sure Dornstein left out about 10,000 more stories that he could have added in the book. Like a book with a lot of "stories," some stories are better than others and you tend to have to sift through the ho-hum parts but the book is very well written and composed. Get it for that uncle that's still waiting on his accident claim of "slipping in the supermarket aisle as he was trying to reach for some generic beer" to settle while he has to "do time in the barcalounger while detectives with video cameras have to monitor him."

Thorough and interesting.

As a Property and Casualty Investigator for Nationwide SIU, I found the book to be very informative, and enlightening.