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The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde
Here is the true story of Bonnie Parker (1910-1934) and Clyde Barrow (1909-1934), a young sociopathic Southern couple gunned down by authorities after a two-year crime spree that left twelve people dead. This history cuts through hype and mythology and examines the outlaws' liberal and dysfunctional sex life, their astonishing ability to elude a 1000-man posse, the contradictory accounts of the mythic ambush that resulted in their deaths and the extraordinary growth of Bonnie and Clyde legend.
280 pages, Paperback
First published May 24, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 26, 2022
Very interesting and seemingly well researched double biography. I had to take off a point for the photo caption that described a semi-automatic pistol as a "revolver" - because it cast doubt on the rest of the facts.
October 3, 2025
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the names themselves, carry a mythic resonance that surpasses the sum of their lives, murders, and robberies. They have been endlessly evoked in cinema, song, and literature, transformed from flesh-and-blood criminals into symbols of rebellion, doomed romance, and American transgression. John Treherne’s The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde undertakes the difficult task of navigating between these worlds: the factual and the fabricated, the archival and the mythological, the public memory and the private reality.
What strikes the reader immediately is the tension inherent in the project. The book seeks to historicize a legend, yet in doing so, it unavoidably participates in the myth-making that it claims to critique. Treherne’s work is therefore a kind of meta-text, a commentary on the ways in which history, media, and memory coalesce to produce figures who are at once real and larger-than-life.
From the very outset, Treherne situates Bonnie and Clyde within their socio-economic context: the Depression-era United States, a landscape of poverty, desperation, and limited mobility. Far from the glamorous outlaws of Hollywood, the Barrow gang emerges as a product of systemic precarity, a cohort of young people navigating a harsh world with few legitimate options. Treherne meticulously documents their backgrounds—Bonnie’s childhood marked by ambition thwarted by circumstance, Clyde’s early brushes with petty crime, the formation of the Barrow gang.
He emphasizes that the duo’s criminality was not born in a vacuum but was interwoven with the structural violence of the 1930s: tenant farming, rural isolation, and law enforcement that was at once predatory and incompetent. By grounding the narrative in socio-economic realities, Treherne positions his work as corrective to the glamorized narratives that Hollywood and popular culture have long perpetuated.
Yet from the very act of chronicling comes a paradox: the more detail the historian provides, the more the legend is both illuminated and destabilized. Treherne’s archival rigor—police records, newspaper accounts, personal letters—renders Bonnie and Clyde legible as historical actors, subject to causality, psychology, and social forces. But the very act of making them legible, of providing cause-and-effect explanations for their actions, simultaneously erodes the aura of spontaneous, mythic rebellion that has made their story endure.
The postmodern reader senses that every explanation, every attempt to map their lives accurately, is also a form of narrative control: to historicize is to domesticate the legend, to translate it into comprehensible, knowable terms. And yet the raw facts, when juxtaposed with public memory, only highlight the strangeness of their history, for even well-documented events take on surreal dimensions when they are filtered through media hysteria, folk imagination, and the photographic gaze.
Treherne is particularly attentive to the role of media in shaping the Bonnie and Clyde mythos. Newspapers of the era, eager for sensational copy during the Depression, transformed a string of violent robberies into serial drama. Every shootout, every narrow escape, every minor criminal misstep became fodder for front-page storytelling, framing the duo as both dangerous criminals and tragic romantics. Treherne demonstrates, with a critical eye, how these media narratives contributed to the emergence of a collective consciousness around Bonnie and Clyde: they were no longer merely actors in crimes; they became symbols of rebellion against authority, of transgression against normative social structures.
The irony is palpable: the same newspapers that vilified them as murderers also elevated them to celebrity status, and this duality underscores the postmodern instability of identity and narrative. Historical actors are never merely themselves; they are always constructed through the lenses of representation, a theme Treherne subtly foregrounds throughout.
The textual architecture of the book itself echoes these tensions. Treherne oscillates between chronological narration, thematic digressions, and analytical commentary. The prose is neither purely academic nor purely sensational; it inhabits a liminal space that mirrors the very subject it examines. In reading, one is constantly aware of the mediation at play: the historian’s voice, the archival voice, the media voice, and the folk-legend voice all intersect and occasionally collide.
A reader might pause at an anecdote of a botched robbery and note that it reads like a scene from a crime film—because it is. The factuality of the account does not diminish its narrative drama; indeed, it intensifies it, producing a postmodern tension in which the line between reality and fiction is both enforced and undermined.
Treherne’s treatment of violence is particularly striking. He documents murders, shootouts, and robberies with precision, never shying away from the brutality of the Barrow gang’s actions. Yet he is careful to situate this violence within a broader social and symbolic framework.
Violence, in the Depression-era imagination, was both sensational and seductive; it was news, theater, and cultural performance. By detailing both the physical acts and their media amplification, Treherne encourages the reader to confront the ethical ambivalence that surrounds Bonnie and Clyde. Were they mere killers? Were they victims of circumstance? Were they antiheroes? Postmodern critique finds fertile ground here: identity, morality, and historical meaning are never stable, never singular, and the book, by attending to these ambiguities, allows the legend and the reality to coexist in uneasy symmetry.
Perhaps most compelling is Treherne’s attention to the intimate dimension of Bonnie and Clyde. Their relationship, often reduced to mythic shorthand as “passionate and doomed,” is rendered with nuance. Letters from Bonnie, recollections from contemporaries, and circumstantial evidence are woven into a portrait of two young people navigating affection, loyalty, and fear under extreme conditions. Treherne avoids romanticization, yet he also does not flatten their emotional life into mere biographical fact. Instead, he presents it as a series of performative acts, moments of intimacy that were always intertwined with public performance, with survival, and with the pressures of criminal enterprise. The result is a meditation on relationality under duress: the couple’s bond becomes both a site of genuine emotion and a stage for cultural projection.
Treherne is equally attentive to law enforcement and the failures, improvisations, and overreach that marked the pursuit of the Barrow gang. The narrative chronicles ambushes, narrow escapes, and tactical errors, highlighting the chaotic interplay between the criminals and those tasked with stopping them. The reader sees a dance of violence and strategy, an ongoing negotiation between mobility, constraint, and authority. Postmodern interpretation finds resonance here: every act of control generates resistance; every effort to discipline the outlaws produces new myths and unforeseen consequences. The law, like history itself, cannot contain the legend it seeks to suppress.
One of the book’s most fascinating dimensions is its treatment of photography and image. Bonnie and Clyde were among the first criminals whose images circulated widely, producing iconic photographs that blended menace, charisma, and intimacy. Treherne carefully analyzes these photographs, noting how they were circulated in newspapers and how they contributed to public fascination. The images are performative: Bonnie with a cigar, Clyde with a pistol, both arranged to convey defiance and style. Yet the postmodern lens reveals the slippage between image and reality. The photographs are not transparent documentation; they are semiotic constructions, artifacts of public consumption, moments in which criminal identity is mediated and stylized. Treherne’s subtle attention to this interplay between visuality and narrative deepens the reader’s understanding of how myths are forged.
The author does not shy away from the contradictions embedded in his subject. Bonnie and Clyde were both ordinary and extraordinary, cruel and tender, calculated and reckless. They inspired fear and admiration, moral condemnation and cultural fascination. Treherne’s narrative strategy is to present these contradictions without collapsing them into a single interpretive frame. The book, in effect, performs a postmodern suspension of judgment: it acknowledges complexity, multiplicity, and ambivalence as essential to understanding the duo. The historical account is thus inseparable from a reflection on myth-making itself: the past is never simply recovered; it is always mediated, narrated, and interpreted.
Treherne also engages with historiographical debates, particularly the tension between sensationalism and scholarship. He critiques earlier biographies that romanticized the duo or relied on unverified accounts, while simultaneously recognizing that sensationalism was intrinsic to their historical reception. The postmodern implication is that history is performative: the way events are recorded, reported, and remembered shapes their meaning as much as the events themselves. In this sense, Treherne’s book becomes self-reflexive: it is conscious of its own participation in the ongoing construction of the Bonnie and Clyde myth. Every fact, every quotation, every archival reference is curated, mediated, and positioned within a narrative frame. History is not neutral; the historian cannot escape the literary and cultural matrices in which the story circulates.
The prose itself supports this postmodern sensibility. Treherne writes with clarity, yet his narrative is layered with irony, subtle commentary, and occasional narrative asides that highlight the strangeness of the events he describes. Moments of humor, terror, and absurdity coexist in a careful balance, producing a reading experience that is both informative and interpretively rich. The book refuses a linear moral lesson: it neither sanctifies nor demonizes, but invites the reader to inhabit the complexity of the past, to confront the uncanny resonance of historical actors whose lives were brief, violent, and endlessly mediated.
By the time the narrative reaches its inevitable climax—the ambush and killing of Bonnie and Clyde in Louisiana—the reader is prepared not merely to witness the factual event but to reflect on the cultural afterlife of that violence. The shootout, so often reproduced in photographs, films, and folk memory, exemplifies the inseparability of fact and myth. Treherne treats the moment with documentary care, yet the reader cannot help but perceive its symbolic weight: the final tableau of fame, notoriety, and mediated death. The postmodern lens insists that we read this both as history and as cultural performance, a mediated spectacle in which reality and legend are intertwined.
Treherne’s contribution to the scholarship and popular understanding of Bonnie and Clyde lies precisely in this double vision. He provides rigor and context while attending to the processes of myth-making that render the pair iconic. He reminds us that historical actors are always interpreted, that public fascination transforms behavior into symbol, that narrative and image are inseparable from lived experience. The book demonstrates that history is always performed and performed upon: the stories that endure are those that balance fact and fiction, immediacy and mediation, reality and legend.
Ultimately, The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde is a meditation on the instability of narrative itself. It presents a case study in how culture, media, and history collaborate to produce icons, and how these icons circulate, mutate, and resist final interpretation. Treherne’s work challenges the reader to inhabit ambiguity: to see Bonnie and Clyde as young people caught in desperate circumstances, as skilled criminals, as media spectacles, and as mythic symbols. He refuses closure, and in doing so, he captures the postmodern truth that identity, memory, and history are never singular, never fixed, never fully knowable. The book, then, is less a biography than a meditation on the processes that produce biographies, less a crime chronicle than a reflection on cultural memory, less a history than a study of myth-making itself.
Reading Treherne, one is compelled to reflect on the broader implications of cultural fascination with outlaws. Bonnie and Clyde are compelling precisely because they embody contradictions: youth and violence, intimacy and transgression, lawlessness and charisma. They provide a canvas upon which society projects desires, fears, and moral questions. Treherne’s historical narrative illuminates these dynamics without collapsing them, offering a sophisticated analysis of how legend and life, narrative and fact, intersect. The reader comes away with a deeper understanding not only of Bonnie and Clyde but of the mechanisms by which history and culture collaborate to create enduring, even strange, icons.
In the end, the book leaves the reader in a reflective state. The lives of Bonnie and Clyde are comprehensible in fact but surreal in cultural imagination. The “strange history” of the title is literal and figurative: it is a chronicle of actions, events, and contexts, but also a meditation on the spectral resonance of fame, infamy, and narrative construction. Treherne demonstrates that history is never simply a matter of documentation; it is always mediated, narrativized, and interpreted. Bonnie and Clyde remain enigmatic, both historical actors and postmodern symbols, and the book’s achievement is to make that duality legible without diminishing its complexity.
In this sense, John Treherne has produced more than a biography. He has produced a reflection on the processes of myth-making, media amplification, and historical interpretation. The strange history he recounts is a cautionary tale for readers and historians alike: the past is never neutral; narratives are constructed; legends endure not because they are true but because they resonate, because they are performed, because they are mediated. To read The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde is to inhabit these contradictions, to acknowledge the impossibility of fully disentangling fact from myth, reality from legend, history from postmodern spectacle.
Treherne’s text thus functions on multiple registers: it is historical documentation, media critique, cultural analysis, and literary reflection. It challenges readers to question their assumptions, to interrogate received narratives, and to recognize the interplay of contingency, choice, and representation.
The book’s postmodern achievement lies not in reveling in ambiguity for its own sake, but in demonstrating that ambiguity is inseparable from understanding: Bonnie and Clyde cannot be fully known, only traced through the interplay of acts, images, interpretations, and memories. The “strange history” is, in fact, the only history possible, and Treherne navigates it with meticulous care and interpretive sophistication.
And so, as one closes the book, one realizes that Treherne’s accomplishment is not to render Bonnie and Clyde comprehensible in the conventional sense, but to render them legible as phenomena that are simultaneously historical, cultural, and mythic. It is a work that inhabits tension, revels in contradiction, and embraces the impossibility of total comprehension.
In a world eager for closure, for simplified narratives, for heroes and villains neatly delineated, The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde insists that complexity, ambiguity, and mediation are central to understanding. And in doing so, it becomes not just a chronicle of criminals, but a meditation on the nature of history, narrative, and cultural memory itself.
What strikes the reader immediately is the tension inherent in the project. The book seeks to historicize a legend, yet in doing so, it unavoidably participates in the myth-making that it claims to critique. Treherne’s work is therefore a kind of meta-text, a commentary on the ways in which history, media, and memory coalesce to produce figures who are at once real and larger-than-life.
From the very outset, Treherne situates Bonnie and Clyde within their socio-economic context: the Depression-era United States, a landscape of poverty, desperation, and limited mobility. Far from the glamorous outlaws of Hollywood, the Barrow gang emerges as a product of systemic precarity, a cohort of young people navigating a harsh world with few legitimate options. Treherne meticulously documents their backgrounds—Bonnie’s childhood marked by ambition thwarted by circumstance, Clyde’s early brushes with petty crime, the formation of the Barrow gang.
He emphasizes that the duo’s criminality was not born in a vacuum but was interwoven with the structural violence of the 1930s: tenant farming, rural isolation, and law enforcement that was at once predatory and incompetent. By grounding the narrative in socio-economic realities, Treherne positions his work as corrective to the glamorized narratives that Hollywood and popular culture have long perpetuated.
Yet from the very act of chronicling comes a paradox: the more detail the historian provides, the more the legend is both illuminated and destabilized. Treherne’s archival rigor—police records, newspaper accounts, personal letters—renders Bonnie and Clyde legible as historical actors, subject to causality, psychology, and social forces. But the very act of making them legible, of providing cause-and-effect explanations for their actions, simultaneously erodes the aura of spontaneous, mythic rebellion that has made their story endure.
The postmodern reader senses that every explanation, every attempt to map their lives accurately, is also a form of narrative control: to historicize is to domesticate the legend, to translate it into comprehensible, knowable terms. And yet the raw facts, when juxtaposed with public memory, only highlight the strangeness of their history, for even well-documented events take on surreal dimensions when they are filtered through media hysteria, folk imagination, and the photographic gaze.
Treherne is particularly attentive to the role of media in shaping the Bonnie and Clyde mythos. Newspapers of the era, eager for sensational copy during the Depression, transformed a string of violent robberies into serial drama. Every shootout, every narrow escape, every minor criminal misstep became fodder for front-page storytelling, framing the duo as both dangerous criminals and tragic romantics. Treherne demonstrates, with a critical eye, how these media narratives contributed to the emergence of a collective consciousness around Bonnie and Clyde: they were no longer merely actors in crimes; they became symbols of rebellion against authority, of transgression against normative social structures.
The irony is palpable: the same newspapers that vilified them as murderers also elevated them to celebrity status, and this duality underscores the postmodern instability of identity and narrative. Historical actors are never merely themselves; they are always constructed through the lenses of representation, a theme Treherne subtly foregrounds throughout.
The textual architecture of the book itself echoes these tensions. Treherne oscillates between chronological narration, thematic digressions, and analytical commentary. The prose is neither purely academic nor purely sensational; it inhabits a liminal space that mirrors the very subject it examines. In reading, one is constantly aware of the mediation at play: the historian’s voice, the archival voice, the media voice, and the folk-legend voice all intersect and occasionally collide.
A reader might pause at an anecdote of a botched robbery and note that it reads like a scene from a crime film—because it is. The factuality of the account does not diminish its narrative drama; indeed, it intensifies it, producing a postmodern tension in which the line between reality and fiction is both enforced and undermined.
Treherne’s treatment of violence is particularly striking. He documents murders, shootouts, and robberies with precision, never shying away from the brutality of the Barrow gang’s actions. Yet he is careful to situate this violence within a broader social and symbolic framework.
Violence, in the Depression-era imagination, was both sensational and seductive; it was news, theater, and cultural performance. By detailing both the physical acts and their media amplification, Treherne encourages the reader to confront the ethical ambivalence that surrounds Bonnie and Clyde. Were they mere killers? Were they victims of circumstance? Were they antiheroes? Postmodern critique finds fertile ground here: identity, morality, and historical meaning are never stable, never singular, and the book, by attending to these ambiguities, allows the legend and the reality to coexist in uneasy symmetry.
Perhaps most compelling is Treherne’s attention to the intimate dimension of Bonnie and Clyde. Their relationship, often reduced to mythic shorthand as “passionate and doomed,” is rendered with nuance. Letters from Bonnie, recollections from contemporaries, and circumstantial evidence are woven into a portrait of two young people navigating affection, loyalty, and fear under extreme conditions. Treherne avoids romanticization, yet he also does not flatten their emotional life into mere biographical fact. Instead, he presents it as a series of performative acts, moments of intimacy that were always intertwined with public performance, with survival, and with the pressures of criminal enterprise. The result is a meditation on relationality under duress: the couple’s bond becomes both a site of genuine emotion and a stage for cultural projection.
Treherne is equally attentive to law enforcement and the failures, improvisations, and overreach that marked the pursuit of the Barrow gang. The narrative chronicles ambushes, narrow escapes, and tactical errors, highlighting the chaotic interplay between the criminals and those tasked with stopping them. The reader sees a dance of violence and strategy, an ongoing negotiation between mobility, constraint, and authority. Postmodern interpretation finds resonance here: every act of control generates resistance; every effort to discipline the outlaws produces new myths and unforeseen consequences. The law, like history itself, cannot contain the legend it seeks to suppress.
One of the book’s most fascinating dimensions is its treatment of photography and image. Bonnie and Clyde were among the first criminals whose images circulated widely, producing iconic photographs that blended menace, charisma, and intimacy. Treherne carefully analyzes these photographs, noting how they were circulated in newspapers and how they contributed to public fascination. The images are performative: Bonnie with a cigar, Clyde with a pistol, both arranged to convey defiance and style. Yet the postmodern lens reveals the slippage between image and reality. The photographs are not transparent documentation; they are semiotic constructions, artifacts of public consumption, moments in which criminal identity is mediated and stylized. Treherne’s subtle attention to this interplay between visuality and narrative deepens the reader’s understanding of how myths are forged.
The author does not shy away from the contradictions embedded in his subject. Bonnie and Clyde were both ordinary and extraordinary, cruel and tender, calculated and reckless. They inspired fear and admiration, moral condemnation and cultural fascination. Treherne’s narrative strategy is to present these contradictions without collapsing them into a single interpretive frame. The book, in effect, performs a postmodern suspension of judgment: it acknowledges complexity, multiplicity, and ambivalence as essential to understanding the duo. The historical account is thus inseparable from a reflection on myth-making itself: the past is never simply recovered; it is always mediated, narrated, and interpreted.
Treherne also engages with historiographical debates, particularly the tension between sensationalism and scholarship. He critiques earlier biographies that romanticized the duo or relied on unverified accounts, while simultaneously recognizing that sensationalism was intrinsic to their historical reception. The postmodern implication is that history is performative: the way events are recorded, reported, and remembered shapes their meaning as much as the events themselves. In this sense, Treherne’s book becomes self-reflexive: it is conscious of its own participation in the ongoing construction of the Bonnie and Clyde myth. Every fact, every quotation, every archival reference is curated, mediated, and positioned within a narrative frame. History is not neutral; the historian cannot escape the literary and cultural matrices in which the story circulates.
The prose itself supports this postmodern sensibility. Treherne writes with clarity, yet his narrative is layered with irony, subtle commentary, and occasional narrative asides that highlight the strangeness of the events he describes. Moments of humor, terror, and absurdity coexist in a careful balance, producing a reading experience that is both informative and interpretively rich. The book refuses a linear moral lesson: it neither sanctifies nor demonizes, but invites the reader to inhabit the complexity of the past, to confront the uncanny resonance of historical actors whose lives were brief, violent, and endlessly mediated.
By the time the narrative reaches its inevitable climax—the ambush and killing of Bonnie and Clyde in Louisiana—the reader is prepared not merely to witness the factual event but to reflect on the cultural afterlife of that violence. The shootout, so often reproduced in photographs, films, and folk memory, exemplifies the inseparability of fact and myth. Treherne treats the moment with documentary care, yet the reader cannot help but perceive its symbolic weight: the final tableau of fame, notoriety, and mediated death. The postmodern lens insists that we read this both as history and as cultural performance, a mediated spectacle in which reality and legend are intertwined.
Treherne’s contribution to the scholarship and popular understanding of Bonnie and Clyde lies precisely in this double vision. He provides rigor and context while attending to the processes of myth-making that render the pair iconic. He reminds us that historical actors are always interpreted, that public fascination transforms behavior into symbol, that narrative and image are inseparable from lived experience. The book demonstrates that history is always performed and performed upon: the stories that endure are those that balance fact and fiction, immediacy and mediation, reality and legend.
Ultimately, The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde is a meditation on the instability of narrative itself. It presents a case study in how culture, media, and history collaborate to produce icons, and how these icons circulate, mutate, and resist final interpretation. Treherne’s work challenges the reader to inhabit ambiguity: to see Bonnie and Clyde as young people caught in desperate circumstances, as skilled criminals, as media spectacles, and as mythic symbols. He refuses closure, and in doing so, he captures the postmodern truth that identity, memory, and history are never singular, never fixed, never fully knowable. The book, then, is less a biography than a meditation on the processes that produce biographies, less a crime chronicle than a reflection on cultural memory, less a history than a study of myth-making itself.
Reading Treherne, one is compelled to reflect on the broader implications of cultural fascination with outlaws. Bonnie and Clyde are compelling precisely because they embody contradictions: youth and violence, intimacy and transgression, lawlessness and charisma. They provide a canvas upon which society projects desires, fears, and moral questions. Treherne’s historical narrative illuminates these dynamics without collapsing them, offering a sophisticated analysis of how legend and life, narrative and fact, intersect. The reader comes away with a deeper understanding not only of Bonnie and Clyde but of the mechanisms by which history and culture collaborate to create enduring, even strange, icons.
In the end, the book leaves the reader in a reflective state. The lives of Bonnie and Clyde are comprehensible in fact but surreal in cultural imagination. The “strange history” of the title is literal and figurative: it is a chronicle of actions, events, and contexts, but also a meditation on the spectral resonance of fame, infamy, and narrative construction. Treherne demonstrates that history is never simply a matter of documentation; it is always mediated, narrativized, and interpreted. Bonnie and Clyde remain enigmatic, both historical actors and postmodern symbols, and the book’s achievement is to make that duality legible without diminishing its complexity.
In this sense, John Treherne has produced more than a biography. He has produced a reflection on the processes of myth-making, media amplification, and historical interpretation. The strange history he recounts is a cautionary tale for readers and historians alike: the past is never neutral; narratives are constructed; legends endure not because they are true but because they resonate, because they are performed, because they are mediated. To read The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde is to inhabit these contradictions, to acknowledge the impossibility of fully disentangling fact from myth, reality from legend, history from postmodern spectacle.
Treherne’s text thus functions on multiple registers: it is historical documentation, media critique, cultural analysis, and literary reflection. It challenges readers to question their assumptions, to interrogate received narratives, and to recognize the interplay of contingency, choice, and representation.
The book’s postmodern achievement lies not in reveling in ambiguity for its own sake, but in demonstrating that ambiguity is inseparable from understanding: Bonnie and Clyde cannot be fully known, only traced through the interplay of acts, images, interpretations, and memories. The “strange history” is, in fact, the only history possible, and Treherne navigates it with meticulous care and interpretive sophistication.
And so, as one closes the book, one realizes that Treherne’s accomplishment is not to render Bonnie and Clyde comprehensible in the conventional sense, but to render them legible as phenomena that are simultaneously historical, cultural, and mythic. It is a work that inhabits tension, revels in contradiction, and embraces the impossibility of total comprehension.
In a world eager for closure, for simplified narratives, for heroes and villains neatly delineated, The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde insists that complexity, ambiguity, and mediation are central to understanding. And in doing so, it becomes not just a chronicle of criminals, but a meditation on the nature of history, narrative, and cultural memory itself.
March 19, 2019
Good book, well written. It doesn't mention that fact that Clyde was raped so I don't know what's up with that. Still, the book had given me a realistic representation of what happened and really done a good job of disillusioning me.
August 23, 2023
3.5 ⭐️s Interesting, comprehensive look at the lives of Bonnie and Clyde and their subsequent legacy.
The author frequently refers to Clyde as a psychopath which seems outdated odd today; and seems to want to ensure the reader doesn’t think of him as some sort of outlaw hero which he seemingly wasn’t.
This book is reasonably balanced and appears to showcase the various sides of the story and tells it in an understandable and concise manner.
The author frequently refers to Clyde as a psychopath which seems outdated odd today; and seems to want to ensure the reader doesn’t think of him as some sort of outlaw hero which he seemingly wasn’t.
This book is reasonably balanced and appears to showcase the various sides of the story and tells it in an understandable and concise manner.
April 13, 2019
Excellent book about killers I've heard of all of my life; they definitely were not Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty!!
September 9, 2010
This book was interesting. It tells the more realistic story of Bonnie and Clyde and puts them into historical perspective as well as sheds light on the way they acted; lived and carried themselves. They were not the smooth glamorous characters of 30s legend but bumbling unsucessful crooks whose frequent trigger happy panics and bad driving skills during their many petty thefts and raids shed unecessary and attention getting bloodshed and mayhem wherever they went.
September 11, 2013
I must say, I'm not a huge fan of true crime stories, but this book was a very interesting read. I first borrowed it from a library, then about 1/3 into the read, I bought a copy. The book's title couldn't be more spot on. An informative book about Bonnie and Clyde, their adventures and misadventures. Read this book, then watch the films.
August 27, 2013
It amazes me how inefficient the police were back then. Bonnie and Clyde killed 12 people in the South Midwest. The films about them are not accurate. They were killed in May 1934, both in their early 20's.
September 11, 2016
After reading two other Treherne books I was anticipating something great. Unfortunately, though well researched, this history proves neither strange nor interesting.
December 10, 2016
This is a great read if you want to know more about the lives and deaths and the legend surrounding the real Bonnie and Clyde. Highly recommend it for those interested!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews