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A review by dryadgurrl
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn
5.0
Sixteen seconds.
This is the time, by best accounts, between the first and final shots fired by the posse of lawmen at the Ford V-8 driven by Clyde Barrow with his partner Bonnie Parker in the passenger seat on the morning of May 23rd 1934.
We all know how the story ends, I knew going in how the story was going to end, but that small fact, that miniscule span of time still hit me like a punch to the chest. People have criticized Jeff Guinn for adding too many details to the book, making it more a history of the time than of the people, but that was one of the things I liked best about it. I think this is also part of the reason that the fact that the gunshots only lasted sixteen seconds hit me as hard as it did, because by the time I got to the end I felt like I was right there in the middle of it, and had been for the whole ride. To me it felt like I knew these people, Bonnie, Clyde, even the posse shooting at them, these were people I’d come to know, even respect.
Jeff Guinn takes two larger-than-life folk heroes and writes about them in a way that makes them very accessible and very, very human. They were just two young people who loved each other and loved their families and were doing their best to get by in a world that seemed intent on keeping them down.
Buck Barrow (Clyde’s brother) had a self-professed philosophy of life and that was: “A good run is better than a poor stand.” This seems to have been a lifelong theme with both Clyde and Bonnie, because wherever he went, she went along, she loved him and knew from the start that if he was going down, they’d go down together.
It’s the little details that Guinn adds that really make the book for me, things like the fact that during a shootout in Joplin, Missouri on April 13th 1933 Blanche Barrow (Buck Barrow’s wife) had a dog named Snow Ball that ran off during the skirmish, Guinn notes: “No one knows what became of the dog”
In the same vein, not long after, in Lucerne, Indiana May 11th the gang robbed a bank and during their escape, a local farmer ran a herd of pigs into the road in attempt to stop their car, Clyde just kept on driving, accelerating and plowing right through them. According to Guinn: “Two hogs were killed - the only fatalities in Lucerne that morning.” These little throwaway lines are two of my favorite, and there are many others, just gentle notations that transcend good biography-writing and move into just good storytelling.
There is much that is contested about Clyde and Bonnie both, such as whether or not Clyde wrote a letter to Henry Ford in 1934, praising him on his automobiles: “Even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V-8” Even if this wasn’t penned by Clyde it seems to most the kind of thing he would have done, because it fit his sense of humor.
Bonnie, also, had a sense of humor, upon giving her mother Emma a rabbit named Sonny Boy, Bonnie reportedly said: “Keep him away from the cops, he’s been in two gun battles and he’ll land at Huntsville [a Texas penitentiary] if the law finds it out.”
These are the kind of things that I liked about Guinn’s writing, the things that helped me connect with Bonnie and Clyde in a way I never thought I would. I would recommend this book to fans of history, fans of Bonnie and Clyde lore, and people who just like a good story. I think we can all relate to the famous duo with the way they’re presented in Go Down Together.
Clyde’s epitaph, the one that graces the headstone shared with his brother Buck, as Guinn notes, says it best: “Gone but not forgotten.”
This is the time, by best accounts, between the first and final shots fired by the posse of lawmen at the Ford V-8 driven by Clyde Barrow with his partner Bonnie Parker in the passenger seat on the morning of May 23rd 1934.
We all know how the story ends, I knew going in how the story was going to end, but that small fact, that miniscule span of time still hit me like a punch to the chest. People have criticized Jeff Guinn for adding too many details to the book, making it more a history of the time than of the people, but that was one of the things I liked best about it. I think this is also part of the reason that the fact that the gunshots only lasted sixteen seconds hit me as hard as it did, because by the time I got to the end I felt like I was right there in the middle of it, and had been for the whole ride. To me it felt like I knew these people, Bonnie, Clyde, even the posse shooting at them, these were people I’d come to know, even respect.
Jeff Guinn takes two larger-than-life folk heroes and writes about them in a way that makes them very accessible and very, very human. They were just two young people who loved each other and loved their families and were doing their best to get by in a world that seemed intent on keeping them down.
Buck Barrow (Clyde’s brother) had a self-professed philosophy of life and that was: “A good run is better than a poor stand.” This seems to have been a lifelong theme with both Clyde and Bonnie, because wherever he went, she went along, she loved him and knew from the start that if he was going down, they’d go down together.
It’s the little details that Guinn adds that really make the book for me, things like the fact that during a shootout in Joplin, Missouri on April 13th 1933 Blanche Barrow (Buck Barrow’s wife) had a dog named Snow Ball that ran off during the skirmish, Guinn notes: “No one knows what became of the dog”
In the same vein, not long after, in Lucerne, Indiana May 11th the gang robbed a bank and during their escape, a local farmer ran a herd of pigs into the road in attempt to stop their car, Clyde just kept on driving, accelerating and plowing right through them. According to Guinn: “Two hogs were killed - the only fatalities in Lucerne that morning.” These little throwaway lines are two of my favorite, and there are many others, just gentle notations that transcend good biography-writing and move into just good storytelling.
There is much that is contested about Clyde and Bonnie both, such as whether or not Clyde wrote a letter to Henry Ford in 1934, praising him on his automobiles: “Even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V-8” Even if this wasn’t penned by Clyde it seems to most the kind of thing he would have done, because it fit his sense of humor.
Bonnie, also, had a sense of humor, upon giving her mother Emma a rabbit named Sonny Boy, Bonnie reportedly said: “Keep him away from the cops, he’s been in two gun battles and he’ll land at Huntsville [a Texas penitentiary] if the law finds it out.”
These are the kind of things that I liked about Guinn’s writing, the things that helped me connect with Bonnie and Clyde in a way I never thought I would. I would recommend this book to fans of history, fans of Bonnie and Clyde lore, and people who just like a good story. I think we can all relate to the famous duo with the way they’re presented in Go Down Together.
Clyde’s epitaph, the one that graces the headstone shared with his brother Buck, as Guinn notes, says it best: “Gone but not forgotten.”