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GO DOWN TOGETHER

THE TRUE, UNTOLD STORY OF BONNIE AND CLYDE

Detailed if middling tale of white trash taken out none too soon—but, as Barrow’s tombstone says, “Gone but not forgotten.”

An exercise in historical revisionism revealing, among other things, that Bonnie Parker didn’t like cigars.

Texas journalist Guinn (co-author: The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame, 2005, etc.) has bones aplenty to pick with Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Arthur Penn and the other principals involved in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. For one thing, he notes, it should have been Clyde and Bonnie, since Clyde Barrow was the brains and muscle behind their Depression-era exercise in mayhem. For another, the depiction of Texas lawman Frank Hamer as a bumbler who let Bonnie and Clyde escape “clearly was false.” Hamer had no contact with the pair until the fateful day when he caught up with them in Gibsland, Texas, where they were famously filled with lead. Guinn’s list of errors goes on, a touch tediously, but he has a point. During their 1932–34 crime spree, readers drew on tabloids for information about the Barrow Gang and viewed them as latter-day Robin Hoods until the ugly murder of a Texas cop led the public to change its opinion and dub the gang psychopaths. (Bonnie was transformed overnight from “sexy companion of a criminal kingpin” to “kill-crazy floozy.”) Today, most people who know anything about them know it through the highly romanticized lens of the Penn film. Guinn assembles what is reliably certain about Barrow and Parker, who grew up lean and mean in Texas and used crime as a means of escaping poverty and boredom. Neither offers much potential as an icon, though Gibsland now milks their corpses for what it can. Guinn’s prose is often ham-fisted, but the story’s intrinsic interest survives.

Detailed if middling tale of white trash taken out none too soon—but, as Barrow’s tombstone says, “Gone but not forgotten.”

Pub Date: March 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-4165-5706-7

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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