BOOKS: Escape the ordinary with two reads on Bonnie and Clyde

by Star-Ledger Book Contributors

Friday May 22, 2009, 5:05 PM

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde
Jeff Guinn
Simon & Schuster, 480 pages, $27

Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind The Legend
Paul Schneider
Henry Holt, 320 pages, $25

REVIEWED BY ALLEN BARRA

The spectacular deaths of Clyde Chestnut Barrow and Bonnie Elizabeth Parker on a Louisiana back road in 1934 made them household names. Without the ambush and the hugely influential 1967 film staring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, it’s doubtful that their fame would have lasted long enough to inspire two fine books on the 75th anniversary of their deaths.

In “Go Down Together,” Texas based journalist Jeff Guinn calls Barrow “short and scrawny,” and Parker “a cute little old girl” and a borderline alcoholic. Clyde was a petty criminal — his first offense may have been poultry theft at age 16 — before serving a stint in the Eastham Prison Farm described by Guinn as “the filthiest hell hole in the entire corrupt Texas criminal justice system.” He was raped by a prisoner and took his revenge by clubbing the man to death.

The diminutive Bonnie (4-feet-11 and perhaps 90 pounds) was an out-of-work waitress when she met Clyde, with whom she immediately fell in love. Both had a literary bent: Bonnie wrote poetry about their life together, while Clyde wrote letters to Henry Ford praising his cars. They would have been tickled to know that their car, guns and even blood-strained clothing became sought-after items for memorabilia collectors.

Paul Schneider’s “Bonnie and Clyde” is a nonfiction novel in the style of Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (everything, including dialogue has a direct source identified in endnotes). The novelistic technique lets his book go places a straight biography cannot go. Shortly before their deaths, the weary outlaws fantasize about a peaceful life: “Things are going to be good … Clyde’s even got himself a saxophone again. A person can play ‘Melancholy Baby’ all night long out in those woods and no one will ever hear it.” Both of them, of course, knew Clyde would never have time to learn to play that saxophone.

Guinn tells you the story from the outside, while Schneider presents the story the way it might have been from the inside. Both leave you feeling like you just dodged a bullet.

Allen Barra is a freelance writer from South Orange.

The Fifth Floor
Michael Harvey
Alfred A. Knopf, 273 pp., $23.95

REVIEWED BY KATHLEEN DALEY

Michael Kelly is a private investigator who knows a lot of people in Chicago. On the fifth floor of City Hall in this town, in the office of the mayor, sits John J. Wilson. Hizzoner is at the heart of Kelly’s search for the killer of Allen Bryant, the owner of a book about the Chicago Fire of 1871. It seems the mayor’s great-great-grandfather may have stood to make a lot of money grabbing the land where Mrs. O’Leary and her legendary fire-starting cow hung out.

Kelly’s old pals in town include cops, a very attractive judge, a sleazy reporter and, most significantly, the wife and daughter of one of the mayor’s henchmen. Some of his new acquaintances are a computer whiz who works in the county building where old land records are stored, a reporter framed and banished to the hinterlands because he got in the mayor’s way and the Chicago Historical Society staff.

Harvey is obviously a fan of Raymond Chandler — short chapters, clipped sentences and a cool hero who wastes no time linking all of these friends, old and new, to solve the mystery. But the twisty, turning plot, based on a quintessential moment in this city’s history — with a stereotypical Chicago pol at the heart of the hunt — renders the city of Chicago the story’s only fully formed character.

Kathleen Daley is a freelance reviewer from Morristown.

Warren Oates: A Wild Life
Susan Compo
University Press of Kentucky, 472 pp., $34.95

REVIEWED BY WALLACE STROBY

If American movies of the 1970s have a face, it belongs to Warren Oates.

With his wind-etched squint, toothy grin and rumpled charm, Oates was an iconic figure in American film. Though he never achieved the leading man status he sought, he became one of Hollywood’s most ubiquitous character actors (between 1970 and ‘79 alone, he appeared in 24 films and a dozen TV shows). Although best known for the four films he made with friend and fellow hell-raiser Sam Peckinpah, Oates worked with directors as varied as William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick.

This is the first major biography of Oates, and Compo has done her homework, interviewing those who knew him best, including ex-wives, children, friends and costars such as Robert Culp and Peter Fonda. All speak of Oates with affection, admiration and regret. An inveterate womanizer, hard drinker and frequent substance abuser, Oates unapologetically burned the candle at both ends, dying of a heart attack in 1982 at age 53.

Unfortunately, Compo is often too enamored of the stories she’s hearing, citing — at length — anecdotes that shed little or no light on their subject. She’s also a little too fond of half-clever turns of phrase and strained metaphors (she describes the jokes in Oates’ 1973 pothead Western “Kid Blue” as falling “flatter than a panhandle pancake”).

Despite his excesses, Oates always seemed to value the stabilizing effect his family and friends had on him. And though Peckinpah cast him in two undisputed classics — “Ride the High Country” and “The Wild Bunch” — those closest to Oates considered the hard-partying director to be a dangerous influence on him. As famous for his alcoholic rages as his artistic genius, Peckinpah would die two years after Oates, at 59, estranged from his family, his health ruined, and his personal and professional life a shambles.

But good films outlive the troubles of those who made them. And Warren Oates made a lot of good films — and a handful of great ones. A wild life maybe, as this fine biography tells us, but not a bad one.

Wallace Stroby is a former Star-Ledger editor and the author of the novels “The Heartbreak Lounge” and “The Barbed-Wire Kiss.” His third novel, “Gone Till November,” will be published in January by St. Martin’s Press.

Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur
Halima Bashir, with Damien Lewis
Ballantine/One World, 336 pp., $25

Halima Bashir is a 29-year-old physician born into the Zaghawa tribe in the African nation of Sudan. But for her adoring father, wealthy by tribal standards, and her tough old grandmother, Bashir would be just one more victim of the ethnic warfare in her country. But her father sent her to a school better than her village could offer and her grandmother gave her the steely will to stand up to those who tried to oppress her.

She writes of her days as a doctor in rural villages, of her brutal rape at the hands of Arab soldiers bent on wiping out “black dogs and slaves,” and of her struggles with the bureaucrats in London who wanted to deny her a safe haven. She tells the story in a workmanlike way, with no great literary skill and many cliches, but the power of the story throbs.

– Kathleen Daley

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury
Alison Light
Bloomsbury Press, 376 pp., $30

‘If you have a house, you must have servants,” Virginia Woolf once said. But the brilliant feminist, who thought, wrote and spoke about the role of women in early 20th-century society, wrestled with her complex dependence on Sophie Farrell and Nellie Boxall, two women who lived and worked in her family homes.

Alison Light describes how Woolf got along day-to-day with the women who emptied her chamber pots and lived in cold, dark basements. But she also quotes from Woolf’s diaries and writings to show how this pioneer in the field of sexual politics was blind to what was going on downstairs. In her will, Woolf left Nellie, her servant of 18 years, a mere 10 pounds.

Light pads her book with compelling statistics on England’s servant class, demonstrating the place of most women at that time was in someone else’s kitchen.

– K.D.

A Map of Home
Randa Jarrar
Other Press, 290 pp., $24.95

‘What is more important? Your happiness or mine?” asks Waheed Ammar, Nidali’s Palestinian father. Nidali, a smart and stubborn young woman, not surprisingly, thinks her happiness should come first. So she fights every day to prevail.

In this debut novel by Randa Jarrar, who grew up in Kuwait and moved to the United States after the Gulf War, Jarrar’s alter ego Nidali tells the story of this domineering, abusive father who nevertheless believed passionately in his daughter’s right to learn and make a name for herself.

There are many humorous, imaginative moments in this coming-of-age family saga, particularly scenes featuring Nidali’s Greco-Egyptian mother whose only interest is playing the piano. The wackiness seems odd in a story about a family’s precarious life searching for permanence during the Gulf War. But the funny, often irreverent bits set a refreshing tone in a novel that enlightens our understanding of individuals caught in the cross-hairs of cultural and civic chaos.

– K.D.

Skeletons at the Feast
Chris Bohjalian
Three Rivers Press, 400 pp., $14.95

Like Irene (“Suite Francaise”) Nemirovsky, Chris Bohjalian tries his hand at the plight of civilians caught in the horror of World War II. And though Bohjalian is no match for Nemirovsky, the war is a setting that intrinsically creates drama.

The Emmerichs, Prussian beet farmers, are forced to leave their estate as the Russians advanced from the East in 1944. The father and two sons join the beleaguered German army, while Mutti (mother) flees with Anna, 18, and Theo, 10, trusting their horses will carry them to safety. They are accompanied by Callum, a Scots prisoner of war assigned to dig antitank trenches at their estate. The Jewish subplot and third leg of a love triangle is played out by Uri/Manfred, a character with multiple identities who jumps off a train headed for Auschwitz and meets up with the Emmerichs.

The action-filled story includes requisite musings on the difficulty of making correct ethical choices in time of war.

– K.D.

Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University
William C. Dowling
Penn State Press, 208 pp., $23.95

Focusing on the campaign of a student-faculty group to remove Rutgers from the Big East Conference, author and professor William Dowling raises important points about the impact of university athletics spending on academics and a school’s overall identity. Students, he notes, used the internet to gain support, well before web-based social networking became the norm.

And yet, however well-researched his accounts, Dowling’s rigid stance against Division IA athletics makes for an uncompromising read. He returns to familiar arguments that position sports fans against intellectual and academic achievement, and his prose is often so dryly academic that it will mostly appeal to other academics already convinced of his views. To persuade a wider audience, he might have partnered with one of the sportswriters he frequently reviles; a third party’s more balanced account would have tempered Dowling’s impassioned rigidity to clarify his argument.

– Elizabeth Willse