Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde

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What I found more interesting though, was what was not said. A good third of the book was historian notes, and the picture they paint of Blanche and her relative innocence is very different from her own account. If you want to really meet THE Bonnie Parker and THE Clyde Barrow, then the only way you are going to do it properly is to read this book. I got this book out of the library on a whim, strolling around the New Books section. Part of what drew me in was the cover art - it's very nicely done. But, as we know... can't judge a book by its cover, right? I breezed through it in a little over a day. Brooks has a very fluid writing style. I could read chapter after chapter and not really find a good stopping place. The story is tumultuous, emotional, and at times violent (but really not very graphic). Perhaps the most effective and surprising ramification of this, though, is how Guinn convincingly calls into question just how much Barrow and Parker ever really had a better alternative. The story of their dead-end world in Dust-Bowl Texas, and particularly of the Barrows’ utterly dispiriting poverty, comes across as just unremittingly bleak. Unless the prospects for a young person in Depression-era Dallas slums were significantly brighter than Guinn’s account suggests, one has difficulty seeing any reason Bonnie & Clyde would have particularly preferred lives of impoverished drudgery to brief careers as famous criminals, even allowing for the deglamorized reality of the latter.

The Story of Suicide Sal – Bonnie Parker 1932". cinetropic.com. Archived from the original on March 18, 2010 . Retrieved April 21, 2010. I've seen Larry Buchanon's documentary entitled The Other Side of Bonnie & Clyde (1968). In it, Barrow Gang associate Floyd Hamilton is shown being questioned about Bonnie & Clyde. Strangely, the scene is introduced by the interviewer saying that he's going to give Hamilton a polygraph test. That never happens. The person presented as being Hamilton is shown as saying: The American National Insurance Company of Galveston, Texas, paid the life insurance policies in full on Barrow and Parker. Since then, the policy of payouts has changed to exclude payouts in cases of deaths caused by any criminal act by the insured. [114] The companion piece to Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Bonnie & Clyde are also covered in Burroughs's book, but he got a few details wrong and his primary focus was Dillinger. A few years after Burroughs's book was published Jeff Guin set out to write a comprehensive book looking at the two outlaws lives and deaths. The result is a thoroughly researched and imminently readable biography of the two famous outlaws whose legend is greater than the reality. The element of inevitable doom in Bonnie & Clyde’s tale probably contributes a lot to this, and while Guinn makes it a very real presence, he hardly had to invent it; throughout much of their brief criminal careers, B&C knew there was only one possible ending to their story, and were often completely frank and casual about it.

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It ends, presciently: “Some day they’ll go down together / they’ll bury them side by side / to few it’ll be grief / to the law a relief / but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”

We all know how it ends. Guinn writes that final scene in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, the best I’ve ever seen it described. It is gruesome and heartless, born out of a real fear of these outlaws who had proven themselves to be as dangerous and unpredictable as trapped animals. 130 rounds were poured into that 1934 Cordoba Gray, 8 cylinder, deluxe sedan Ford with the greyhound radiator cap, which had been stolen in Topeka, Kansas, and forever now known as THE DEATH CAR. When the legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer walks up to the car and puts one final blast into Bonnie, a few expletives escaped my lips. I felt a flare of anger that attests to the difference between knowing people and just knowing they existed. Last night, I heard Bonnie’s screams in one of my nightmares, and the men who were there that day heard them for the rest of their lives. James R. Knight, "Incident at Alma: The Barrow Gang in Northwest Arkansas", The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Arkansas Historical Association Winter, 1997) 401. JSTOR 40027888.The idiomatic phrase "modern-day Bonnie and Clyde" generally refers to a man and a woman who operate together as present-day criminals. [ citation needed] Final run [ edit ] Former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the Barrow Gang's relentless shadow after the notorious Eastham prison breakout W.D. Jones committed two murders in his first two weeks with Barrow at age 16. The cut-down shotgun is one of his "whippit" guns. Bonnie with a shotgun reaches for a pistol in Clyde's waistband. Go Down Together is revisionist history. It is what we might call a deconstruction, an excavation of the Bonnie and Clyde legend that scours away romance, hyperbole, and false motivations. From a reader’s standpoint, the trouble with such a deconstruction is that it can leave you wondering why you bothered in the first place. In other words, there are times when you scrape away so many layers that you are left without anything at all.

I never really knew anything about Bonnie and Clyde beyond the fact that they were Depression-Era bank robbers, they died in a bullet-riddled ambush and they were played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the film. That was literally the sum total of my knowledge, so this book was a real revelation and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I couldn't put it down. You’ve read the story of Jesse James-Of how he lived and died; If you’re still in need of something to read, here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde...Some day they’ll go down together; And they’ll bury them side by side. To a few it’ll be grief-To the law a relief- But its death for Bonnie and Clyde.” Treherne, John. The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde. (New York: Stein and Day, 1984.) ISBN 0-8154-1106-5. Her verbiage was authentic and raw with words like “walls”; depicting prison; “hot”; where police were on the lookout; and “tourist camps”; where criminals as well as the down and out family could reside for a time. This made the memoir authentic as well as personal.First look at A&E Network's 'Bonnie & Clyde' remake: Recast movies & TV roles". New York Daily News. Archived from the original on June 7, 2013 . Retrieved May 23, 2013. Victims of kidnapping included: Deputy Joe Johns on August 14, 1932; Officer Thomas Persell on January 26, 1933; civilians Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone on April 27, 1933; Sheriff George Corry and Chief Paul Hardy on June 10, 1933; Chief Percy Boyd on April 6, 1934. Heller, Scott (December 16, 2011). "Bonnie & Clyde Will Close on Dec. 30". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 6, 2012 . Retrieved December 31, 2011. Officials of the Texas Rangers, Texas Highway Patrol, and Texas Department of Public Safety honored the memory of patrolman Edward Bryan Wheeler on April 1, 2011, who was murdered along with officer H. D. Murphy by the Barrow gang on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1934. They presented the Yellow Rose of Texas commendation to his last surviving sibling, 95-year-old Ella Wheeler-McLeod of San Antonio, giving her a plaque and framed portrait of her brother. [155] In popular culture [ edit ] Films [ edit ]