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Title: Bonnie and Clyde: A Love Story by Bill Brooks ISBN: 0-7653-0799-5 Publisher: Forge Books Pub. Date: 21 November, 2003 Format: Unknown Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Powerful Love Story
Comment: In reading this book, I felt a subtle rhythm building under my skin as if I were in the book with the characters, traveling along, not wanting to get so close, but being forced by these sparse prose into a world both strange and familiar. Each word felt like a pebble carefully tossed in a pond, the motion lasting long after the pebble disappeared beneath the surface. Brooks sets the reader down in the young years of life between childhood and adulthood when idealism and realism become a wild unpredictable mix that can lead to the most bizarre and sometimes violent acts of human behavior. He downplays the incidents of violence while the results of the killings are carefully driven inside the reader, staying long afterwards, emphasizing that the real meaning of violence occurs in the days, month, and years that follow as the loved ones frame their lives around the lingering silence of their losses. Bonnie and Clyde are at once repugnant and tender. Though I could not understand it fully, almost against my will I was drawn into their love story. I can't wait to read another book by Bill Brooks.
Rating: 5
Summary: Terse, hard-edged, bursting with love, life - and death
Comment: In order to read this book I set aside Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Living to Tell the Tale". Whether you take that for the compliment I mean it to be depends on your opinion of Marquez; but I think he's the greatest writer alive. I'd been waiting for his new book for months and was halfway through it - and loving every word - when Bill Brooks' "Bonnie and Clyde: A Love Story" arrived. I opened it and read its incomparable first passage about a hardscrabble farmer watching an outlaw V8 roar past his house, and that was the end of Marquez till two days later when Bonnie and Clyde went down in their famous hail of bullets.
For those of you unfortunate enough not to know, Bill Brooks is one of the best writers in America. He's done several excellent westerns including the now-classic "The Stone Garden: The Epic Life of Billy the Kid", but lately has specialized in limning hard-edged portraits of some of the most infamous figures of our recent past.
I doff my sombrero to this guy. This book is one heck of a piece of writing. It's hard to say what I admire most, but I guess I'd have to start with the voice, which is so spare and hard, and so right for the Depression era, but at the same time is packed with condensed feeling. He's really holding the secret of how to say more with less. I think it was Thomas Wolfe who said there were two kinds of writers, putter-inners and taker-outers. Brooks is the master of taker-outers. There's not an excess word in the whole text, and the ones that are there have been chosen and crafted with exquisite care. Yet despite the terseness, the book feels full to bursting. That means, to me, Brooks is a poet, and a darn good one.
He takes these marginal people who live so far beyond the bounds of convention that it would ordinarily be difficult to identify with them, and makes them into somebody the reader can sympathize with and care about. Brooks also defies ordinary expectations and passes so lightly over the violence which would've made his book sensational, and maybe more marketable, and instead makes the story a human one, a love story. And it's a real love story - the kind of not-quite-grown-up love that people in their early 20s are apt to get besotted with, but is all the more powerful almost because of its immaturity.
I have not yet returned to Marquez, because Brook's other new book, "Pretty Boy Floyd" is on my desk now. Sorry, Maestro, you'll have to wait just a little while longer.
Rating: 5
Summary: strong biographical fiction
Comment: In Depression Era Texas, Bonnie Thornton works at Marc's Café while her husband Roy is spending five years behind bars. One day Clyde Barrow enters the café and he and Bonnie cannot stop looking at each other. Though she is married, they begin seeing one another as Bonnie's penchant for bad boys with a certain edge is clearly packaged in the 5'7" 120 pounds Clyde.
Soon Bonnie helps Clyde break out from jail and is arrested for her part in his escape. Not long afterward, Bonnie and Clyde begin riding together robbing banks and killing people with a vow that they will live and die together forever.
This is a strong work of fiction that brings to life a great love story even if the lead couple were a deadly pair. It is the love story that has romanticized this odd relationship and that is the prime focus of this delightful story line. From the first time they saw each other until the final shooting in their car, in spite of the bloody trail, Bonnie and Clyde has become a romance legend and that is what this book is all about.
Harriet Klausner
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Title: Bonnie and Clyde: A Twenty-First-Century Update by James R. Knight, Jonathan Davis ISBN: 1571687947 Publisher: Eakin Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Phillip W. Steele, Marie Barrow Scoma ISBN: 156554756X Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Running With Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults by John Neal Phillips ISBN: 0806134291 Publisher: Red River Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde by E. R. Milner ISBN: 0809319772 Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: The Last Goodbye by Reed Arvin ISBN: 0060555513 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 17 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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