May 2023 - True Crime Book Club - Past Titles - LibGuides at Westwood Public Library

"Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde" by Jeff Guinn

Go Down Together by Jeff Guinn
Call Number: 364.15 Guinn
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.

Did you know the story of Bonnie & Clyde before reading “Go Down Together”?
What did you learn from the book that you hadn’t known before?
Why do you think Bonnie & Clyde are still glamorized in pop culture? What makes them more interesting than Blake Fitzgerald & Brittany Harper?
In what ways are Bonnie and Clyde portrayed as heroes? What were some of their personality traits?
Based on the book's cover, what were your expectations for the book? Were you right?
The cover depicts an iconic, vintage photo of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. What do the photo and the rest of the cover suggest regarding the time period, the individuals pictured there, etc.?
Thinking about how each of the characters grew up, how did that affect their lives?
How did Clyde’s time in prison contribute to his criminal lifestyle? Would anything have deterred him?
What do you make of the relationships between Blanche & Buck? Even after Blanche’s most prized possession, Snow Ball is lost to her, she continues to stay by Buck’s side while nagging him. Why?
What do you make of the family dynamics between the Parkers and Barrows? Why did the family unwaveringly protect the criminals? What does this say about familial bonds?
What legacy did Bonnie & Clyde leave behind? Is being infamous criminals a legacy?
Do you think that Guinn got to the truth about Bonnie & Clyde? What truths did you discover that differ from the legend usually surrounding Bonnie & Clyde?
Did you find yourself doing any research on topics brought up in the book? If so, on what?
Did you read any of Bonnie’s poems? What did you think of them? Was she a good poet or simply glamorized for her escapades?
Bonnie had big dreams for her life (a Broadway actress, a well-known poet, etc.). Why do you think she ‘settled’ for the criminal lifestyle of Clyde? Love? Popularity? Being seen?
Was there an end to how far Bonnie & Clyde would’ve gone for each other? Why or why not? What bonded them together in such a way?
Why do you think image was so important to Bonnie & Clyde? Bonnie is more upset with being thought of as a cigar smoker than being a criminal. Clyde makes all of the Barrow Gang members dress in suits.
Do you think the deaths of Bonnie & Clyde were fair? Should they have been given the chance to surrender by Hamer and his posse? Would they have done so? Or was death the only way to stop Bonnie & Clyde?

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow were an American criminal couple who traveled the Central United States with their gang during the Great Depression. The couple was known for their bank robberies, although they preferred to rob small stores or rural funeral homes.

FBI — Year of the Gangster, Part 2

FBI 100 - Bonnie and Clyde

FBI Records: The Vault — Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie & Clyde Ambush Museum

Poet Bonnie Parker's Poems

Trace the Historic, Tragic Saga of Notorious Criminals Bonnie and Clyde With This Southern Road Trip

Jeff Guinn is the bestselling author of numerous books, including Go Down Together, The Last Gunfight, Manson, The Road to Jonestown, War on the Border, and Waco.
He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.
Jeff Guinn is the winner of the 2016 TCU Texas Book Award.
The former books editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and award-winning investigative journalist, he is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

“Guinn’s “clear-eyed” account acquits the couple of some of the gang’s worst transgressions but never romanticizes them” (The Week)
“if we examine their lives as a story, then it has everything: young kids rebelling against authority, there's the Romeo and Juliet thing, true love, and think they're really mostly interesting to us finally because of the way they die in this bloody, graphic, ambush when, essentially, they're blown, in the words of one of the deputies during the shooting, into a pile of wet rags. Would they have been as interesting to us if, let's say, they'd surrendered meekly that day, got long prison sentences, and came out sort of bent, worn-out old people? No, I don't think so. You had to have the great supposed tragedy and the drama of their deaths, and that's why, in various forms, the story's held us ever since. It's been 75 years, and yet thousands of people still troop out to look at their graves every month.” (NPR)
“In a sense, all my books are about how our culture takes history and re-shapes it into whatever mythology suits our collective needs and interests at a given time. I wanted to answer two questions in Go Down Together. The first was, why would two young people willingly give up their lives for a very brief period of lawbreaking? Second, why would a nation find them fascinating and elevate them to the same sort of iconic heights enjoyed by Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth just a few years earlier? There had to be some sort of event-driven sociological chemistry at work. What was it?” (CBS News)
“In a very real sense, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker are less important for themselves than for what they represent. They reflect a time in our history when there was a huge chasm between a few very rich Americans and millions of poor ones. Young people born into poverty had no hope for improving their lives. Yet modern media - movies, newspapers, magazines - shoved into their faces images of fancy cars, fine clothes, glamour in every conceivable form - on a daily basis. When ambitious kids want things they can't have by following the rules, they break them. That's immutable fact. The parallels between the Barrow Gang era and modern-day America are staggering. Once again, many struggling people don't trust the government, think of the banking industry as the enemy, and feel helpless to save themselves and their families by doing what they are told to do (obey all the laws, trust the government). We can either learn from the past or, in some more modernized form, repeat it.” (CBS News)

True Crime

The Last Gunfight

Go Down Together

Manson

The Road to Jonestown

Waco

Nonfiction

The Vagabonds

War on the Border

Our Land Before We Die

Something in the Blood

The Sixteenth Minute

Sports

Dallas Cowboys: The Authorized Pictorial

You Can't Hit the Ball With the Bat on

When Panthers Roared

Sometimes a Fantasy

Fiction

Silver City

Glorious

Buffalo Trail

Christmas

The Autobiography of Santa Claus

How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas

The Christmas Chronicles

The Great Santa Search

Santa's North Pole Cookbook

Jeff Guinn

Movie & Television Appearances
- Writer
  - Love Is a Gun (pre-production)
  - 2018 - Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle (TV Mini-Series documentary)
- Producer
  - 2018 - Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle (TV Mini-Series documentary)
- Personal Appearances
  - 2020 - Helter Skelter: An American Myth (TV Mini-Series documentary)
  - 2019 - Manson: Music from an Unsound Mind (Documentary)
  - 2019 - Very Scary People (TV Series documentary)
  - 2018 - Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle (TV Mini-Series documentary)
  - 2018 - Truth and Lies: Jonestown, Paradise Lost (TV Movie documentary)
  - 2017 - 20/20 (TV Series documentary)
    - Truth and Lies: The Manson Family (March 17, 2017)
  - 2016 - American Experience (TV Series documentary)
    - Bonnie & Clyde (January 19, 2016)
  - 2015 - CNN Special Reports (TV Series)
    - Face of Evil: The Charles Manson Murders (August 18, 2015)
  - 2013 - The Cycle (TV Series)
    - Episode dated 6 August 2013 (2013)
  - 2009 - Timewatch (TV Series documentary)

The Real Bonnie and Clyde (July 30, 2009)

Bonnie & Clyde

“The Other Side of Bonnie & Clyde” 1968
“The Bonnie Parker Story” 1958
“Bonnie & Clyde vs Dracula” 2008
“Heaven's Burning” 1997
“Teenage Bonnie & Klepto Clyde” 1993
“Bonnie & Clyde” 1967
“Infamous” 2020
“Bonnie & Clyde: Justified” 2013
“Bonnie & Clyde: The True Story” 1992
“Chasing Bonnie & Clyde” 2015
“The Highwaymen” 2019
“Love is a Gun” pre-production
“Bonnie & Clyde Italian Style” 1982
“Bonnie & Clyde” miniseries 2013
“Timeless: Last Ride of Bonnie & Clyde” season 1, episode 9 2016
“Legend of Bonnie & Clyde” by Merle Haggard
There are numerous other references to Bonnie & Clyde in popular culture!

My Life with Bonnie and Clyde by Blanche Caldwell Barrow; John Neal Phillips
Call Number: 364.15 Barrow
Blanche wrote her memoir between 1933 and 1939, while serving time at the Missouri State Penitentiary. Following her death, Blanche’s good friend and the executor of her will, Esther L. Weiser, found the memoir wrapped in a large unused Christmas card. Later she entrusted it to Phillips, who had interviewed Blanche several times before her death. Drawing from these interviews, and from extensive research into Depression-era outlaw history, Phillips supplements the memoir with helpful notes and with biographical information about Blanche and her accomplices.
Killing the Mob by Bill O'Reilly; Martin Dugard
Call Number: 364.106 O'Reilly
In the tenth book in the multimillion-selling Killing series, Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard take on their most controversial subject yet: The Mob. Killing the Mob is the tenth book in Bill O'Reilly's #1 New York Times bestselling series of popular narrative histories, with sales of nearly 18 million copies worldwide, and over 320 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. O'Reilly and co-author Martin Dugard trace the brutal history of 20th Century organized crime in the United States, and expertly plumb the history of this nation's most notorious serial robbers, conmen, murderers, and especially, mob family bosses. Covering the period from the 1930s to the 1980s, O'Reilly and Dugard trace the prohibition-busting bank robbers of the Depression Era, such as John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby-Face Nelson. In addition, the authors highlight the creation of the Mafia Commission, the power struggles within the "Five Families," the growth of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the mob battles to control Cuba, Las Vegas and Hollywood, as well as the personal war between the U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and legendary Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. O'Reilly and Dugard turn these legendary criminals and their true-life escapades into a read that rivals the most riveting crime novel. With Killing the Mob , their hit series is primed for its greatest success yet.
Scarface and the Untouchable by Max Allan Collins; A. Brad Schwartz
Call Number: 364.1092 Collins
In 1929, thirty-year-old gangster Al Capone ruled both Chicago's underworld and its corrupt government. To a public who scorned Prohibition, "Scarface" became a local hero and national celebrity. But after the brutal St. Valentine's Day Massacre transformed Capone into "Public Enemy Number One," the federal government found an unlikely new hero in a twenty-seven-year-old Prohibition agent named Eliot Ness. Chosen to head the legendary law enforcement team known as "The Untouchables," Ness set his sights on crippling Capone's criminal empire. Today, no underworld figure is more iconic than Al Capone and no lawman as renowned as Eliot Ness. Yet in 2016 the Chicago Tribune wrote, "Al Capone still awaits the biographer who can fully untangle, and balance, the complexities of his life," while revisionist historians have continued to misrepresent Ness and his remarkable career. Enter Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, a unique and vibrant writing team combining the narrative skill of a master novelist with the scholarly rigor of a trained historian. Collins is the New York Times bestselling author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition. Schwartz is a rising-star historian whose work anticipated the fake-news phenomenon.
Animal by Casey Sherman
Call Number: 364.1524 Sherman
Joe Barboza knew that there were two requirements for getting inducted into the Mafia. You had to be Sicilian. And you had to commit a contract killing. The New Bedford-born mobster was a proud Portuguese, not Sicilian, but his dream to be part of La Cosa Nostra proved so strong that he thought he could create a loophole. If he killed enough men, if he did enough of the Mafia's dirtiest biddings, then they would have no choice but to make him a Made Man.Barboza's brutal rise during one of the deadliest mob wars in U.S. history became the stuff of legend, both on the bloodied streets of Boston and in the offices of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney General. He took sick joy in his crimes, and it became increasingly difficult for the mob to keep the Animal on his leash. But soon the hunter became the hunted. Betrayed by the mob and now on the run, Boston's most notorious contract killer forged a Faustian bargain with two unscrupulous FBI agents--a pact that would transform the U.S. criminal justice system. From false testimony and manipulated evidence that sent mob leaders to death row, to the creation of the Witness Protection Program so the feds could protect their prized, cold-blooded witness, this was the horrific, dramatic first act in a story of murder and FBI corruption still being played out today in the news and the courtroom with the capture and trial of Whitey Bulger. Barboza's legacy, buried for years thanks to the murders or deaths of its participants, is finally coming to light and being told in its unvarnished brutality by one of America's most respected true crime writers.
Bonnie and Clyde by Paul Schneider
Call Number: 364.1552 Schneider
The flesh-and-blood story of the outlaw lovers who robbed banks and shot their way across Depression-era America, based on extensive archival research, declassified FBI documents, and interviews The daring movie revolutionized Hollywood-now the true story of Bonnie and Clyde is told in the lovers' own voices, with verisimilitude and drama to match Truman Capote's In Cold Blood .Strictly nonfiction-no dialogue or other material has been made up-and set in the dirt-poor Texas landscape that spawned the star-crossed outlaws, Paul Schneider's brilliantly researched and dramatically crafted tale begins with a daring jailbreak and ends with an ambush and shoot-out that consigns their bullet-riddled bodies to the crumpled front seat of a hopped-up getaway car.Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow's relationship was, at the core, a toxic combination of infatuation blended with an instinct for going too far too fast. The poetry-writing petite Bonnie and her gun-crazy lover drove lawmen wild. Despite their best efforts the duo kept up their exploits, slipping the noose every single, damned time. That is until the weight of their infamy in four states caught up with them in the famous ambush that literally blasted away their years of live-action rampage in seconds. Without glamorizing the killers or vilifying the cops, the book, alive with action and high-level entertainment, provides a complete picture of America's most famous outlaw couple and the culture that created them.
Young Al Capone by William Balsamo; John Balsamo
Call Number: BIOGRAPHY CAPONE Balsamo
Many people are familiar with the story of Al Capone, the "untouchable" Chicago gangster best known for orchestrating the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. But few are aware that Capone's remarkable story began in the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn, New York. Tutored by the likes of infamous mobsters Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale, young Capone's disquieting demeanor, combined with the "technical advice" he learned from these insidious pedagogues, contributed to the molding of a brutal criminal whose pseudonym, "Scarface," evoked fascination throughout the world. Despite the best efforts of previous biographers lacking true insider's access, details about Capone's early years have, until now, mostly been shrouded in mystery. With access gained through invaluable familial connections, the authors were able to open the previously sealed mouths of Capone's known living associates. Collecting information through these interviews and never-before-published documents, the life of young Al Capone at last comes into focus. Among the many revelations in Young Al Capone are new details about the brutal Halloween Night murder of rival gangster "Wild Bill" Lovett, grisly details on how Capone and his Black Hand crew cleverly planned the shootout and barbaric hatchet slaying of White Hand boss, Richard "Peg Leg" Lonergan, insight into the dramatic incident that forced Capone to leave New York, and much more.
American Fire by Monica Hesse
Publication Date: 364.1642 Hesse
The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate--there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning.The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson. But as Charlie's confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn't lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other's inspiration and escape...until they weren't.Though it's hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it's been drained of its industry--agriculture--as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity. A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America--a land half gutted before the fires even began.