Bonnie and Clyde

June 1, 2018
A portrait of two victims of the Great Depression whose taste for guns and fast cars led to short careers in crime but longer ones as legends.Blumenthal (Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2016, etc.) makes a determined effort to untangle a mare's nest of conflicting eyewitness accounts, purple journalism, inaccurate police reports, and self-serving statements from relatives and cohorts of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Though the results sometimes read as dry recitations of names and indistinguishable small towns, she makes perceptive guesses about what drove them and why they have become iconic figures, along with retracing their early lives, two-year crime spree, and subsequent transformations into doomed pop-culture antiheroes. She does not romanticize the duo--giving many of their murder victims faces through individual profiles, for instance, and describing wounds in grisly detail--but does convincingly argue that their crimes and characters (particularly Bonnie's) were occasionally exaggerated. Blumenthal also wrenchingly portrays the desperation that their displaced, impoverished families must have felt while pointedly showing how an overtaxed, brutal legal system can turn petty offenders into violent ones. A full version of Bonnie's homespun ballad "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde" and notes on the subsequent lives of significant relatives, accomplices, and lawmen join meaty lists of sources and interviews at the end.Painstaking, judicious, and by no means exculpatory but with hints of sympathy. (photos, timeline, author's note, source notes, bibliography, index) (Biography. 12-14)

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July 1, 2018

Gr 7 Up-Utilizing witness accounts, contemporary news coverage, and material gained from family interviews and personal letters, Blumenthal has written more than a crime narrative or a biography of the famous outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The book presents a social and cultural snapshot of the duo's times as well as a detailed reporting of their crimes, combining information on the couple's deeds and misdeeds with excerpts from Parker's poems, mugshots, newspaper clippings, and family photos. Cultural artifacts and the phenomenon that contributed to the outlaws' legend are explained in highlighted sections, as are obituaries for each of the Barrow gang's victims. Blumenthal humanizes these gangsters of the Great Depression by placing them within the era in which they lived. In doing so, she never minimizes or excuses the carnage and destruction they caused, nor the terrible price they ultimately paid. The insightful back matter includes sections on "What Happened to...?" and "A Note About Facts and Sources." VERDICT This historical true-crime story is recommended for providing nuanced perspective without glorifying the misdeeds that shaped its subjects' lives and deaths.-Kelly Kingrey-Edwards, Blinn Junior College, Brenham, TX

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2018
Grades 7-10 *Starred Review* 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. She would have had no way of knowing it, but Bonnie Parker got one thing wrong in her poem: she and Clyde Barrow were buried apart. An on-and-off subject of public fascination since their two-year rampage across the American Southwest in the 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde have presented an image of glamour, recklessness, freedom, and all-consuming love that has never quite faded from pop culture. In this exquisitely researched biography, Blumenthal doesn't entirely dispute that image, but she's careful to explore why the crime-spree duo was, and is, so easily romanticized, without romanticizing them herself. The text is precise, unemotional, and impartial; this, first and foremost, is an investigation of the hardships people faced during the Great Depression. That Bonnie and Clyde were young people, close to their families, often kind, and placed in extraordinarily difficult circumstances is not disputed, but neither is the extent of their crimes; in sidebars, Blumenthal profiles each of the people that the Barrow Gang killed. Additional sidebars investigate some of the legends surrounding the duo, and the circumstances that led to their popularity. An extraordinarily successful resource about a painful time in history and a complicated, infamous pair.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)