Reviews tagging 'Homophobia'

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

17 reviews

emy_clemy's review against another edition

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dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0


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katadamz's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense medium-paced
Coming out of this novel, I respect Truman Capote as a storyteller and master of the English language even more than I did before. However, he did lose any credibility as a journalist or as someone with reasonable taste in men (
allegedly, he was in love with the murderer Perry Smith
). 

I am glad I finally finished the novel. My initial impression trying to read it over a decade ago was that I would happily read a book about small town American life written by Capote, but that the brutality of these murders was hard to stomach. I stand by that assessment, especially as it crawled to the conclusion, with Capote's focus narrowing onto
Leavenworth's death row
to an almost disturbing focus. The prose though, is beautiful and sparse, in a beautiful mid-20th century style. 

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soswiin's review against another edition

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dark informative tense medium-paced

4.0

definitely a unique format that grabbed my attention more than i thought it would've. yes, inventing dialogue and scenes made it read more like a novel than an informative essay as capote intended but it just didn't feel morally right. which is a dilemma that encompasses 90% of this book's controversies anyway. capote was brave for humanizing the clutter family's killers and i appreciate it to an extent — it elevated the pair from stereotypical jailhouse grunts to fleshed-out individuals with individual wounds and faults. while it added depth it still felt weird to ready about!! bad childhood ≠ the right to blow the brains out of an entire family. lot of repeated information which was quite helpful given the attention span i'd allotted for this.

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jbrown1120's review against another edition

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dark fast-paced

5.0


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tlaynejones's review against another edition

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dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0


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vireoeo's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

4.25

I went into this book curious about the origins of modern true crime, and came out of it with a lot of complicated and unexpected emotions. This book bounces around between a half-dozen stories throughout time, which is one of my favorite narrative devices and is executed really well.

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reiley_61's review against another edition

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informative mysterious slow-paced

2.5


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henrygravesprince's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

3.75

Capote’s prose is masterful, but the non-fiction aspect was handled in a way I don’t find responsible, and I think that, as one of the first major modern true crime media “sensations”, In Cold Blood embodies many of the same problems that true crime media, particularly dramatizations, maintains today. I don’t dislike Capote, and in fact I quite like his writing for the most part, but I couldn’t in good conscience give this book a wholly glowing review. There would still be issues if I looked at it the way one looks at fiction, but monumentally less — that said, it is not purely fiction, and I can’t look at this novel & not be acutely aware of the fact that these were real people & the facts were embellished in ways that can’t really be brushed off, in my opinion.

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shinumi's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative tense medium-paced

4.25


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sammiesavors's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

3.5


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