Bonnie and Clyde
The Lives Behind the Legend
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
The flesh-and-blood story of the outlaw lovers who robbed banks and shot their way across Depression-era America, based on extensive archival research, declassified FBI documents, and interviews
The daring movie revolutionized Hollywood—now the true story of Bonnie and Clyde is told in the lovers' own voices, with verisimilitude and drama to match Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.
Strictly nonfiction—no dialogue or other material has been made up—and set in the dirt-poor Texas landscape that spawned the star-crossed outlaws, Paul Schneider's brilliantly researched and dramatically crafted tale begins with a daring jailbreak and ends with an ambush and shoot-out that consigns their bullet-riddled bodies to the crumpled front seat of a hopped-up getaway car.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow's relationship was, at the core, a toxic combination of infatuation blended with an instinct for going too far too fast. The poetry-writing petite Bonnie and her gun-crazy lover drove lawmen wild. Despite their best efforts the duo kept up their exploits, slipping the noose every single, damned time. That is until the weight of their infamy in four states caught up with them in the famous ambush that literally blasted away their years of live-action rampage in seconds. Without glamorizing the killers or vilifying the cops, the book, alive with action and high-level entertainment, provides a complete picture of America's most famous outlaw couple and the culture that created them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lives and the legends of doomed outlaw lovers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker unfortunately take a back seat to Schneider's narrative style in this heavily researched but poorly executed account. Despite his claim that no dialogue has been invented, Schneider's approach addressing Clyde as "you" ("Feels like you and Bonnie are hot as hell everywhere") is jarring and irritating. Opening in 1934 when Bonnie and Clyde helped several prisoners break out from Eastham Prison Farm in Texas, , Schneider (Brutal Journey) then rewinds to Clyde's hardscrabble youth in the slums outside Dallas, where he met Bonnie in 1930. The increasingly violent exploits of the Barrow Gang are evocative, especially Clyde's first and arguably only premeditated murder in 1931. Yet true to his style, even in their final moments in the ambushed, bullet-ridden car, Schneider forces on readers his own version of Clyde's last thoughts "you remember Bonnie drinking hot chocolate" and ruins what should have been a moment of literal and literary silence. B&w photos.