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DescriptionGo Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde – March 9th 2010 by Jeff Guinn (Author) {Bindaredundat} Format: epub / mobi / pdf  Product Details Hardcover: 480 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (March 10, 2009) Language: English ISBN-10: 1416557067 ISBN-13: 978-1416557067 Kindle: $11.99 Hardcover: $15.05 4 Collectible from $18.00 Paperback: $14.07 Audio CD: $58.95 Forget everything you think you know about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Previous books and films, including the brilliant 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, have emphasized the supposed glamour of America's most notorious criminal couple, thus contributing to ongoing mythology. The real story is completely different -- and far more fascinating.In Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, bestselling author Jeff Guinn combines exhaustive research with surprising, newly discovered material to tell the real tale of two kids from a filthy Dallas slum who fell in love and then willingly traded their lives for a brief interlude of excitement and, more important, fame. Their timing could not have been better - the Barrow Gang pulled its first heist in 1932 when most Americans, reeling from the Great Depression, were desperate for escapist entertainment. Thanks to newsreels, true crime magazines, and new-fangled wire services that transmitted scandalous photos of Bonnie smoking a cigar to every newspaper in the nation, the Barrow Gang members almost instantly became household names on a par with Charles Lindbergh, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth. In the minds of the public, they were cool, calculating bandits who robbed banks and killed cops with equal impunity. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Clyde and Bonnie were perhaps the most inept crooks ever, and their two-year crime spree was as much a reign of error as it was of terror. Lacking the sophistication to plot robberies of big-city banks, the Barrow Gang preyed mostly on small mom-and-pop groceries and service stations. Even at that, they often came up empty-handed and were reduced to breaking into gum machines for meal money. Both were crippled, Clyde from cutting off two of his toes while in prison and Bonnie from a terrible car crash caused by Clyde's reckless driving. Constantly on the run from the law, they lived like animals, camping out in their latest stolen car, bathing in creeks, and dining on cans of cold beans and Vienna sausages. Yet theirs was a genuine love story. Their devotion to each other was as real as their overblown reputation as criminal masterminds was not.Go Down Together has it all - true romance, rebellion against authority, bullets flying, cars crashing, and, in the end, a dramatic death at the hands of a celebrity lawman hired to hunt them down. Thanks in great part to surviving Barrow and Parker family members and collectors of criminal memorabilia who provided Jeff Guinn with access to never-before-published material, we finally have the real story of Bonnie and Clyde and their troubled times, delivered with cinematic sweep and unprecedented insight by a masterful storyteller. Bonnie & Clyde were the first American icons created by modern media. These media-savvy gangsters nurtured a self-image of murderous glamour for Depression-era Americans who hungered for entertainment and larger-than-life characters who defied authority. But the fact is, they were among the most inept criminals in history. Just kids in their early twenties when they started robbing banks and mom-and-pop stores, and killing lawmen, Bonnie and Clyde botched almost every bank robbery they attempted, and sometimes they had to break into gum machines to get meal money. Yet, thanks to the media, Bonnie and Clyde were a great, epic love story and became national icons on a par with cinema gangsters Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.  Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in spring 1933. This photo was taken from unprocessed film discovered by police following an April 13 gun battle in Joplin, Missouri. The Barrow Gang had yet to learn that exposed car license plates like the one in this picture made it easier for their pursuers to track them. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Journalist Guinn (Our Land Before We Die), in this intensely readable account, deromanticizes two of America's most notorious outlaws (they were never... particularly competent crooks) without undermining the mystique of the Depression-era gunslingers. Clyde Barrow, a scrawny kid in poverty-stricken West Dallasin the late 1920s, stole chickens before moving on to cars, following in the footsteps of his older brother, Buck. In 1930, he met 19-year-old Bonnie Parker, and during the next four years Clyde, Bonnie and the ever-revolving members of the Barrow Gang robbed banks and armories all over the South, murdering at least seven people. Bonnie, who fancied herself a poet, wrote, Some day they'll go down together, and they did, in a Louisiana ambush led by famed ex–Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. With the brisk pacing of a novel, Guinn's richly detailed history will leave readers breathless until the final hail of bullets. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine All those who read Guinn's account of Bonnie and Clyde were impressed by the unprecedented level of detail he brings to the story. But a few seemed to think that all of Guinn's data got in the way of the chase. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel admitted that the level of detail posed the book's "only problem," while acknowledging that "the legend still stands under its own power." Indeed, reviewers were generally pleased by Guinn's ability to add new layers to Bonnie and Clyde's brief, hardscrabble lives and to shed new light on their impulses without weighing them down. Reviewers were particularly interested in the idea of the duo as heroes of the Great Depression, with obvious anxiety that that era might not seem so distant these days. Yes, reviewers are prone to provide enthusiastic reviews for a newspaper's books editor; yet Go Down Together is still a strong book. Most Helpful Customer Reviews I couldn't put this book down. By Pathfinder on March 10, 2009 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. An Exemplary Piece of Writing By Mark K. Mcdonough VINE VOICE on March 13, 2009 Format: 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.  Sharing Widget |