63 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I couldn't put this book down., March 10, 2009
This review is from: Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (Hardcover)
This is unquestionably the best-researched book on Bonnie and Clyde, especially since the author got access to 2 unpublished manuscripts by Bonnie's mother and sister. All you have to do is look at the notes in back to see all the research the author did. . . but more than that, it's a great story that grabs you a few pages in and doesn't let you go. It's VERY different from the movie, which was entertaining but had very little to do with the real story. The truth is even more fascinating. I had no idea that Clyde had been raped in jail, and his attacker was the first man he killed . . . or that Bonnie was a smart student who won writing contests in school. But they both were from a filthy West Dallas slum, and just like today, it's almost impossible to escape from your fate when the cards are stacked against you from the git-go. But they really did love each other, and in the last few chapters, when they're just barely evading the authorities and all shot up, you can't help but feel sympathy for these young killers. I know you shouldn't, but Guinn is such a good writer that you do. I loved this book.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exceptionally well crafted dual biography of Bonnie and Clyde, April 30, 2009
This review is from: Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (Hardcover)
I have no idea of how I stumbled across "Go Down Together", but I am certainly glad I did. While I enjoy mysteries and police procedurals, I don't consider myself to be a crime buff. My experience with Bonnie and Clyde was limited largely to the classic 1967 movie and bits and pieces that I had acquired here and there.
Guinn is very serious about his subjects, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. He fills 82 pages with notes, bibliography and acknowledgments. It was his good fortune that he secured access to two previously unpublished manuscripts by family members. Guinn acknowledges that the historical record of the infamous pair is incomplete and cluttered with lies, exaggerations, questionable recollections and much else that isn't true.
Clyde and Bonnie - the way the pair was known until the movie - were children of poverty. Though most impoverished kids made it out of their West Dallas slum neighborhood without robbing a corner grocery or killing someone, Clyde Barrow didn't. Petty thefts and stealing cars became a way of life for the poor boy and he was packed off to prison.
Texas wasn't a congenial state to the poor in the 1930s. (What state was?) The agricultural markets had collapsed followed by the financial markets and the economy as a whole. Social mobility wasn't what it is today: back then, if you were born poor, you generally stayed poor. Texas prisons were harsh environments and young Clyde Barrow was assigned to Eastham, a farm run from the notorious Huntsville prison. There he was continually raped by another prisoner. Clyde demonstrated his outlook on life by murdering the perpetrator.
Released from prison, Clyde put together a "gang" that was incredibly inept. Clyde and his successive "Barrow Gangs" never really achieved much success. But he had one person who never left his side: perky, would be poetess Bonnie Parker. Their relationship and dedication to each other is the real subject of this story.
Clyde was the boss of the "gang". Bonnie was his woman, always present, but never really a part of the actual commission of the crime. She didn't shoot anyone or even rob anyone.
Unlike the movie and many stories, Guinn shows there was little glamor in the lives of these fugitives, both of whom were in their early 20s. Much of the time, they slept in primitive camps, eating Vienna sausages from cans, often cold. They were constantly on the run, always with an eye out for police, of whom they killed several without much reason, other than Clyde's not wanting to go back to prison.
Clyde and Bonnie supported themselves largely through the gang's robberies of grocery and drug stores and gas stations. Occasionally the gang robbed a bank, usually without great financial success.
The Depression era media played up the exploits of Clyde and Bonnie because crime news was cheap entertainment and there was more than a hint of "Robin Hood" in the story of the poor kid from the slums striking back at the capitalist class. None of Clyde's gang was really making a social statement: crime was just how they made their living, though both Bonnie and Clyde basked in the publicity they received.
It was an era of gangsters. While Al Capone was perched at the top, bank robbers like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and others captured the attention of the nation, stoked by lurid, glamorizing stories in the press. Bonnie and Clyde wanted to be part of the upper echelon of crime, but they never rose above small-time criminal activities, no matter how much they were written about.
Guinn paints an intimate portrait of Clyde, Bonnie and their families,whom they were very close with. The unhappiness and despair of the Depression comes through as does the love of the respective mothers for their wayward children. Siblings of both Clyde and Bonnie spent time on the road with them. Clyde's brother, Buck, in fact, was a part of the gang and was the first to die.
There is much here. Guinn has done a first rate job of research not only into the lives of Clyde and Bonnie, but into the times, the West Dallas slums, the lawmen (using the term loosely) charged with protecting the public against criminals,the generally brutish society of the time in rural Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and other states where the gang operated.
Clyde and Bonnie eventually became too great a nuisance, having killed a bunch of police officers and a murderer with a badge was set on their trial. Frank Hamer was a sometimes Texas Ranger who had killed more than 50 men as a "lawman". Eventually with the help of a traitorous member of the Barrow Gang, Clyde and Bonnie met their end, perforated with bullets as a half-dozen lawmen ambushed them.
The story, told with greater historical accuracy than most accounts (though the author is quick to point out that the entire truth is hard to reach)is compelling. These two young kids captured the attention of the media and the populace in a two year crime spree. They weren't noble. They weren't victims of society. They were two young kids who decided to lead a life of crime because they wanted to.
It is a strange story, well told and infinitely interesting. The fatalism of 23 year old Bonnie Parker, crippled for the last year as the result of a car accident caused by the reckless driving of her lover Clyde Barrow, knowing that one day soon she would soon die with him is unnerving.
Jerry
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37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Exemplary Piece of Writing, March 13, 2009
This review is from: Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (Hardcover)
I've got a pretty fair library on 1930s crime and this ranks right at the top. There are two things that stand out. First, it gets the facts right, as much as it is humanly possible to do so. And with Bonnie and Clyde, that's a great service, since their story was mythologized and fictionalized from day one. Second, and more unusual, is that the book places Bonnie and Clyde in their specific social and historical context. It doesn't just tell their story against the general background of the 1930s in America, but delivers an up-close look at what it meant to be poor and uneducated in West Dallas, the grim slum (almost a shantytown) that they both lived in.
Guinn takes care not to excuse their crimes, but I think his reading of their story is persuasive -- that they were two people from a doomed underclass who were unable to accept the long years of misery and deprivation that would ordinarily have been their fate.
He also does a good job of placing them in the context of 1930s crime -- yes, like John Dillinger they (at least occasionally) robbed banks, but they were worlds apart. Dillinger had access to a world of sophisticated criminal contacts. Many of his robberies were set-up jobs in which the banks were in on the deal. He had access to hideouts in "safe" towns like St. Paul and Hot Springs, connections to serious organized crime, doctors who could be trusted, and a whole network of highly experienced and capable confederates.
Bonnie and Clyde were just two kids from the very wrong side of the tracks. They had large and loyal families, but other than that, they were pretty much on their own. They didn't know any crime kingpins, they didn't have entree to the world of "safe" cities, and they had to select their confederates from Clyde's jailhouse buddies and kids from their West Dallas neighborhood -- most of whom knew as little about crime as they did.
I didn't end up rooting for Bonnie and Clyde -- they lived horribly destructive lives punctuated by murders that ultimately resulted from their own lack of sophistication (Guinn argues, fairly convincingly, that they killed mainly when cornered, but they sure got cornered a lot). The book did give me a sense of who they were as people, though, and gave me some empathy for them. They weren't stupid and they weren't crazy "thrill killers." I guess you could say their whole lives, in a way, were a response to being cornered by their poverty and marginality.
Guinn also provides a great portrait of what Dallas and the American middle South were like in the 1930s. Wild and woolly. It was a much more loosely knit society in many ways. It was a world where the cops would stop chasing you at the state line (and sometimes even the county line), and where you could give a different phony name every time you got arrested and who would know...?
Guinn's research, which included access to some unpublished family memoirs, really allowed him to turn two crime icons into two human figures. I knew who Bonnie and Clyde were before reading this book, but now I feel like I have a good sense of what they were like as people.
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