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
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.
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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