Customer Reviews

Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend (John MacRae Books)

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Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend
If an amusement park spent millions on a Bonnie and Clyde adventure extravaganza, you would not get a more thrilling ride than might be had by reading, Paul Schneider's latest book, "Bonnie and Clyde, the Lives behind the Legend."
Clyde Barrow came of age during the Great Depression, if it can be said that he came of age at all -- he was killed when he was 25 (Bonnie Parker, at 24.) This May marks the 75th anniversary of their deaths.
Among the street toughs in and around Dallas, Texas, Barrow worked his way up from petty theft to cars and eventually banks. His reputation grew, and as he managed to stay ahead of the law, his real life exploits came close to matching, and in some cases exceeding, that reputation.
Mr. Schneider ("The Adirondacks," "The Enduring Shore," and "Brutal Journey") conjures a very palatable desperation as well as the excitement of life on the run -- a life with a limited future. His deft delivery will have the reader sweating along with Clyde and his gang, feeling the hunger, desolation, exhaustion, and the camaraderie among thieves.
The story is like a Greek tragedy. There are no surprise endings in traditional Greek tragedy, and no surprise endings in "Bonnie and Clyde." (Most of us have seen the 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.) But it is not the end, but the journey that makes this book worth reading.
Yes, the story includes the car chases, gun battles, and the extraordinary coincidences and bad luck that fed the legend. But there are also the personal battles and questions, Bonnie's poetry and unfailing sense of style and devotion, the thoughts of family, friends and adversaries, and the historic backdrop of Texas during the Depression.
Almost immediately, Mr. Schneider sets the stage and mood with his mastery of descriptive prose. He moves between a narrative that at times seems to mimic those 1930 movie narrators -- part third person omniscient vernacular, and an unusual second person omniscient voice that somehow puts you in the center of all the activity.
Perhaps the most unusual and impressive aspect of this book is that every quoted personal conversation is comprised of words that were actually spoken or written about or by the people doing the talking. These quotes are referenced in 343 citations at the end of the book. Mr. Schneider's ability to rehash and synthesize massive quantities of data into an absorbing read is nothing short of masterful.
Paul Schneider has written another winner. It may be his best book yet.

Historically well researched book.Written from Clyde's point of view, at first I found it a bit irritating,but soon got into the flow of it and could hardly put it down.Anyone who cares about historical accuaracy will love this book.

With BONNIE AND CLYDE: THE LIVES BEHIND THE LEGENDS Schneider accomplishes the nearly impossible -- he has created a book on the exploits of the Depression-era couple that is dull and uninteresting.

Like many who will approach this book, I have read other accounts of the lives of Bonnie and Clyde and other '30's eras gangsters. Bonnie and Clyde's time on the lam with the law in pursuit is filled with exciting and fascinating incidents. But Schneider often gets bogged down in his own research veering off into tangents on the historical period or the most minor of characters, which time and again slows down his narrative.

Rather than being compelling, Schneider's account proves to be less than accessible and surprisingly slow.

The biggest problem is the book's literary conceits. Schneider strives to set his deeply researched biography apart from other accounts by giving it the spin of a non-fiction novel, which never allows him to insert the voice of the researcher, comparing and contrasting versions of events or explaining things cleanly.

The most flawed concept is the insistence on referring to Clyde Barrow as 'you' throughout. Perhaps Schneider initially felt this devise would place the reader in Barrow's head. Instead it proves to do the opposite. It distances the reader from Barrow and from being engaged in the book. Since the perspective of the book jumps around from him using various research and old first-person sources, whenever we come back to Barrow as "you" it is jarring and clumsy. Many times Schneider has to bend sentence structures in pretzel knots to accomodate this devise, when, God forbid, "Clyde" or "Barrow" would have served so much more clearly and cleanly.

I still feel like the best primary source on the lives of Bonnie and Clyde is THE TRUE STORY OF BONNIE AND CLYDE by Emma Parker (Bonnie's mother) and Nell Barrow (Clyde's sister) "Edited" by Jan I. Fortune. Originally published as FUGITVES shortly after Bonnie and Clyde's death. While the prejdices of the sources must be considered, Fortune did an excellent job retaining the voices of Barrow and Parker in the telling of the story, so that these many years later the story takes on a certain literary quality with the flavor of a folk tale being told to you.

THE LIVES AND TIMES OF BONNIE AND CLYDE by E.R. Milner is a much more compelling and readable recent history of their lives. And MY LIFE WITH BONNIE AND CLYDE an edited autobiography by gang member Blanche Barrow also vividly pulls you inside the Bonnie and Clyde story in a way that Schneider's book fails to.

Schneider' book contains many details and incidents I don't recall reading before and may therefore be of interest to others with an insatiable fascination with Bonnie and Clyde, but Schneider tried so hard to make this book interesting, he succeeded only in doing quite the opposite.

The lives behind the legend is the fifth book on Bonnie & Clyde that I have read. This book was well written and more details than the other four. I`ve always thought about their personal hyglene on the road. This was never written about, in such detail, till this book. This probably will be my last book on Bonnie & Clyde, I feel all of my questions are answered.

Jack Kimble
Bakersfield, Calif.

I really do not have much to add in the way of praise for this book. I was under its spell from the first page and spent a couple of late nights reading this account. Schneider can write, and he writes beautifully and powerfully and evocatively. He manages to walk that fine line between providing the reader with insight into Clyde's humanity without making excuses for his behavior. Bonnie, though, is a different story altogether. She represents the saddest story among them all.

Get this book. Enjoy the read.

As its subtitle suggests, Bonnie & Clyde (hereafter "B&C") attempts to reveal the real lives behind the legend of America's most infamous crime couple. It's clear from the start that Paul Schneider believes their legend doesn't do them justice and that it's time to set the record straight. The enormity of that legend doesn't seem to worry him, nor the fact that he's taking on a folktale forged in the fearsome crucible of the Great Depression, backed up by dozens of other books, a hit movie, Earl Scruggs at his banjo-picking best, and the purveyors of everything from pizza to pedicures.

B&C proves Paul Schneider is more than up to that task. Despite some formidable challenges posed by his sources, he has produced an exciting, deeply moving, and often wickedly funny telling of what at its heart is a very tragic story. From start to finish his book is a powerful argument that truth is stranger than legend, and generally a lot more interesting. It's a serious, historical, non-fiction study that nonetheless often reads likes a novel.

Schneider has clearly done a massive amount of research, including much delving into contemporary newspaper accounts and interviews with B&C's friends, schoolmates, family, and partners in crime, as well as their victims and the lawmen that hunted them. He has also looked deeply into their historical context, including the desperate poverty that B&C grew up in and the grim social conditions of the time, complete with the KKK, lynch mobs, cock fights, and the bee-battling youth gangs of 1920s Dallas. He reveals an intimate knowledge of prison conditions and the police methods of the day, and draws on an extensive array of both primary and secondary sources for this. This is all shown by the detailed pictures he paints of B&C, from Clyde's incredibly hardscrabble origins and Bonnie's spelling-bee prowess to their days on the lam complete with pet bunny and saxophone (not to mention a trunkful of Browning automatic rifles) and the tremendous sensitivity he shows to their aspirations and the challenges B&C faced as young people (and as wanted fugitives).

As Schneider notes, much of the B&C saga ultimately derives from interviews with criminals, their families or other people who had a vested interest in protecting them. This includes several of Clyde's partners in crime, who generally claimed to be asleep whenever killings took place. Schneider argues that these kinds of self-serving biases need to be taken into account when assessing Clyde's role in several of the killings attributed to him.

One of the most distinctive features of the book (and arguably the most controversial) is the way Schneider tries to put you into the heads and hearts of Clyde and several other characters by engaging in extended imaginary dialogues with them or creating imaginary monologues for them. If B&C were a comic book, the thought bubbles would easily outnumber the speech balloons.

Much of the book, in fact, could be characterized as one long imaginary dialogue with Clyde, in which the author adopts a tone that ranges from the affectionate to the accusing and sarcastic. Clyde as depicted by Schneider is far from a psychopath, a killer but "not a killer at heart" (p.2), who shoots when he has to, but takes no pleasure in it, but has only limited insight into the havoc he wreaks (although more than one might think). Consequently these imaginary dialogues give us what Clyde's take on a particular situation might have been, when no exact quotes of his remarks survive. They also serve to take Clyde down a peg or two from time to time, (since the author often challenges these "takes", with a sardonic folk voice interjection of his own) and to remind us both of Clyde's criminal mindset and his considerable ability to laugh at himself. They also show why certain sources have to be treated with caution and suggest plausible alternative perpetrators of some of the blackest deeds attributed to Clyde.

There is also a great deal of "mashed up" dialogue in B&C, cobbled together from quotes from two or more widely disparate sources (who may never even have seen each other) to create the illusion these sources are talking to each other or being interviewed simultaneously. Apparently not one word of these dialogues has been invented. Ultimately your opinion of B&C will probably depend on how much you trust these recreations or "mash ups".

For those prepared to suspend their disbelief, these imaginary dialogues/monologues really make the book come alive. They give Clyde more of a voice in the narrative than would be possible in a more conventional biography. They also turn what might otherwise be a dry recitation of dusty facts and moldy trivia into something far more immediate and engaging. Instead of simply stating on date X in town Y Clyde engaged in a gun battle with sheriffs A, B, and C, Schneider opts to put you in the rumble seat right behind Clyde, in mid-gunfight, complete with sound effects and irreverent banter with Clyde that sometimes reads like colour commentary. Or he treats you to a hanging judge's horrified (and politically incorrect) musings about a southern town so depraved it once even lynched a white man. Or a poignant exchange between the son of a lawman gunned down by Clyde (the son's words being quoted from an interview) and an apologetic (sort of) Clyde. It all makes for a much more powerful and penetrating account.

In fairness to Schneider, he doesn't seem to take any significant liberties with the facts in these imaginary monologues and dialogues, although there are certainly judgement calls involved that may trouble some. For the most part, it seems quite possible that Clyde and the other characters who get this treatment would have been thinking what Schneider ascribes to them (although we will never really know). That Clyde would not like getting shot or raped, would be saddened to see Bonnie shot, would be frustrated when a stolen getaway car breaks down at a key moment all seems to follow logically from the facts and from basic human nature. Although there are some imaginary monologues (such as Clyde's dying thoughts) which are credible only if you accept the author's overall characterization of Clyde, and that's where there is more potential for controversy.

It is difficult to summarize Schneider's point of view in a few paragraphs. At times he does sound like Clyde's defence counsel. As the dust jacket notes, he neither glamorizes B&C nor vilifies the cops. But at story's end, you are left with a sense of loss for B&C. He doesn't glamorize, but he goes to great lengths to humanize, to show us that B&C were more than bandits. He also allots some air-time to Clyde's victims.

There is a sense that Schneider is trying to give Clyde the benefit of a doubt. He certainly acknowledges Clyde was a career criminal who killed several lawmen in gun battles and that at times Clyde was his own worst enemy. But he delves deeply into Clyde's origins, to analyze what started him on his life of crime. He makes a strong case that Clyde's path to public enemy number one was not inevitable, that poverty, the justice system, abusive police and brutal prison guards were really what turned Clyde into an outlaw. He notes that Clyde was not bad to other kids. Clyde never seems to have been a bully or a sadist or malicious to his schoolmates. He seems to have had very good relations with his parents and siblings, who stuck with him through thick and thin, and had many fond memories of him. He seems to have been respectful of his parents and there is no hint of abuse. Clyde exhibited many admirable qualities as a youngster, some reporting him to be a hard worker on the farm and elsewhere, and a real musical talent (although no scholar). But he and his family were desperately poor, through no apparent fault of their own, and Schneider suggests Clyde's first forays into criminality (such as stealing scrap metal for his Dad) were motivated mainly to help his family survive.

The heart of Schneider's defence of Clyde rests on his attempts to distinguish the killings that took place in the heat of gun battles with the police or sheriffs from several other more gratuitous killings of civilians or police who posed no imminent threat to him. He argues there is a reasonable doubt as to Clyde's involvement in these more gratuitous slayings. A lot hangs on those arguments; as otherwise it is hard to see Clyde as anything other than a psychopath.

And yet, even though Clyde denied the gratuitous slayings to the end, sometimes the evidence defies Schneider's best efforts to exonerate him.

Schneider suggests that Clyde was no psychopath, noting that he often treated his hostages fairly well, even giving them money to get home after he released them (see p. 249-250), that he prevailed on his brother not to kill hostages when their lives were in his hands, that he apologized for certain killings or for hurting people (see p. 249) and that he refrained from killing tellers who shot at him or who manned banks that turned out to be empty and were completely unapologetic about it. Schneider also cites Clyde's own words, in letters, expressing regret at the necessity to kill and his sense of humour, that enabled him to joke with the police that were seeking his life, and to laugh at himself and his public image even when under unbelievable pressure, a hunted man facing death at every hand.

Both Clyde and his brother Buck seem to have made a real effort to go straight, Clyde moving all the way to Massachusetts apparently to make a fresh start, Buck even turning himself in at the urging of his wife.

Ultimately Schneider's depiction of Clyde, as partially a victim of circumstance, who killed when he had to but not if he could avoid it, is extremely persuasive, precisely because Schneider seems so fair in his acknowledgement of evidence at odds with this depiction. It really seems the only depiction which makes any logical sense, given the lengths Clyde went to to avoid killing sometimes. He doesn't seem to have killed with the remorseless consistency of a true psychopath, provided one accepts Schneider's argument that Clyde was likely innocent of the more gratuitous killings attributed to him. Clyde could easily have multiplied his body count many times over had he enjoyed killing for its own sake (although sometimes in the heat of a gun battle Clyde did spread the lead around with a complete disregard for the civilians in the vicinity and sometimes even seemed to target them).

Yet even Schneider leaves some questions unanswered. In the end, the real triggers for Clyde's criminal career remain mysterious. On the one hand, it is easy to blame his poverty, coupled with police harassment (after he failed to return a rental car on time) that ruined any chance of his holding down a straight job. So runs the legend, at least. And yet, Schneider acknowledges that Clyde may well have been breaking the law on a grand scale throughout that "harassment" period.

Bonnie's case is more unambiguously tragic. She was not on any sort of criminal trajectory when she met Clyde, just a poor young waitress struggling to survive on her own after a disastrous teenage marriage. She had thespian and literary aspirations, was likely responsible for many of the photos that immortalized her and Clyde, and spent much of her life on the run composing a poem about their deeds. Schneider argues that although she had her share of schoolyard scrapes, she grew into a resourceful and considerate young woman.

The choices she ultimately confronted were more reminiscent of an Old Icelandic saga or the darker parts of the Silmarillion. In the end, loving an outlaw meant becoming an outlaw herself. Not for Bonnie the eat, pray, leave option. But there is a question as to how complicit Bonnie became. She seems to have taken little active part in the gun battles (except as a loader), or in the actual act of robbing people (for an exception see p. 248) but was certainly instrumental in many a getaway and in caring for Clyde & co. on the road.

Schneider chronicles in harrowing detail the desperate conditions they often endured on the lam. Riding with Clyde meant months and months of extreme physical discomfort crammed into a crowded car with other criminals, regular brushes with death, gunshot wounds, burns, and agonizing pain with no chance of recourse to a hospital. Baths were also in short supply. And though they had their fights (some sources suggest Clyde even physically abused Bonnie), Bonnie never gave up.

And Bonnie seems to have confronted these challenges open eyed. She was under no illusions as to the fate that awaited her and Clyde, and Schneider cites abundant evidence of this. She comes across as even gutsier than Romeo's Juliet, more like a doomed warrior poet than a waitress.

In the final analysis, Schneider's B&C, like its subjects, is very difficult to do justice to in a few pages. So much more could be said about its style, the author's wonderful ear, and his knack for bringing out the humour in the most tragic of situations. His use of the strategic understatement is masterful, and again invites comparison to the Old Icelandic sagas and other ancient outlaw tales. In all it's a most effective marriage of meticulous scholarship, top-notch writing skills, a wicked sense of humour, and deep human empathy. It is probably the most penetrating yet humane examination of B&C we are likely to get. Strongly recommended.

Not one to put down a book about a subject matter of interest, I nevertheless reluctantly quit this one. Although I don't normally have a problem with switching point of view or voice, I found myself fumbling through this book. Without a heading such as "Clyde", I read a couple of sentences into a section before realizing that I was back to Clyde's point of view, and then I had to restart the paragraph. This disruption eventually put me off and I gave up in annoyance. Also, I didn't feel too confident in the veracity of the thought processes of the characters, so I felt that I was reading more speculation than fact.

With subject matter like this, it's hard to miss, but for me, this book was a miss.

I'm surprised to see this book getting such harsh reviews and that there are so many "die-hard" Bonnie and Clyde fans out there. I have only read one other book about them, so I am no expert. But, I thought the book was a good read and walked a very fine line not making them seem heroic nor like trash either. To some extent he tried to humanize the victims (which is so very important) I read the book in two days, so I had no problems with the writing style and I enjoyed how he called Clyde Barrow "you" every now and then--I followed it, thought it was a creative way to address a biography to the subject matter. If anybody takes anything away from this book, though, I would hope it would be the effect that poverty and hopelessness has not only on two people, but on an entire community of people, especially young people. We don't suffer from the depression era poverty now, but there are a huge number of young kids in America, who are being taught that crime is the only solution out of their neighborhood, and more of their role models are dead or in prison then in college or well-paying jobs. Bonnie and Clyde are not heroes, just two people who made a lot of bad choices.

Ok, I have read all these reveiws. Most of them are good reviews, but they do not tell you what the substance of this book is really about. This Book is about who Bonnie and Clyde really were. I have read everything on clyde and bonnie. Every book that I have read, up to Jeff guinn have few facts in them, except for a couple of books ( john neal Phillps and woodward) Giunn does and great job with Clyde and his family, but for some reason he rips Bonnie and Emma to robbins, calling Bonnie a prostitute. I have been reserching Clyde and Bonnie for 4 years and found that what has been told about them over the years is about 10% accurate. Paul gets it and gets at about 90%, so if you want to get to know Clyde Barrow ans Bonnie Parker this is the book to read.

I liked the storyline and how accurate it was.. but I didnt like the way the author wrote it.. Most of it is actual quotes from friends and family of Bonnie and Clyde and the other half is writen like the author is talking to Clyde himself..
besides the way he wrote it, it was a pretty good book.