In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $13.42 You Save: $9.58 (42%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $7.95 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of In Cold Blood
Book Review: A "Tru man" Capote
Summary: 5 Stars
After viewing "Capote", the biographic film of Truman Capote's coverage of the horrendous slaughter of a Kansas family, we wanted to review the book and film of the murder. Even after all these years, the book still holds up as the hallmark for True Crime Novels. Capote certainly succeeded in capturing an audience for this type of novel.Book Review: A Cold Nights Death
Summary: 5 Stars
Never reading Truman Capote I'm glad this was my first choice.They call it a masterpiece. I can only wholeheartedly concur.This is a beautifully written book about horrible,senseless murder occuring in the late 1950's Kansas outback.The isolation and darkness of the crime pervades one's sense that what we may view as bucolic,hometown pleasantness could be turned instantly into a bloody nightmare on a cold November night.Capote uses the language in a way that is pure genius as he transmits the events,the psychology and the nuts and bolts of crime solving as well as the ultimate penalty to the reader.While digging through articles and books about antisocial/psychopathic behaviors,one book seemed to appear repeatedly in most of the bibliographies.That book was In Cold Blood.I had seen the original movie with Robert Blake et al.An excellent flick which should be viewed at least once.Naturally, I became intrigued and again started to dig for more information about the crime.I found the Clutters,a fascinating almost perfect midwest American dream type family practically out of a book,all slaughtered for nothing by two young psychopaths.Their tales are well told both from the murdering end as well as the formative life experiences that molded them into what they were to become,selfish,confused,egotistical and paranoid men with the "I hate the world" mentality.Traits we commonly see in the antisocial personality.This book should be required reading for all in the field of mental health who may occasionally cross paths with this type.I'm only sorry I waited so long to read it.It's one of those rare books you can't put down and hate to finish.So lock your doors,leave a light on and be prepared for In Cold Blood.Remember,there is a Hickock and Smith in everyone's neighborhood.If you should hear a window or a back door slowly slide open while your in bed,say your prayers fast.Death may have just entered your domain and just like that,BANG your dead.All you have is the change in your pocket? BANG,BANG,BANG,now your families dead.Read it, you won't be sorry but you might get a little shook up.Enjoy a work of literary art.Book Review: A Commentary on our 21st Century Culture
Summary: 5 Stars
I was a child when In Cold Blood was first published but remember the adults in my life talking about this controversial novel. After watching the two recent Truman Capote biopics (Capote and Infamous), I thought I should read it. I was surprised how much this 40+ year old book had to say about the anger, polarization and general lack of civility in today's society. A family is senselessly murdered in a small town in Kansas. Everyone in the town of 6,000 knew this family. After the murderers are apprehended, each minister in this community of 21 churches stood at his pulpit and spokeout AGAINST the capital punishment. Relatives of the slain family wrote a letter published in the local newspaper asking that prosecutors not pursue the death penalty. And when the murderers are returned to Kansas and are walked into the jail for booking, the audience who has gathered for this spectacle stands nearly silent. The town's citizens are relieved that it was strangers who commited this attrocity and they no longer have to eye their neighbors suspiciously. There is little talk of revenge or a sense of closure via the death penalty. What a fascinating view of our society on the cusp of the revolution of the 1960's and 1970's. READ THIS BOOK!Book Review: A Fatal Autumn Evening on the Plains of Kansas
Summary: 5 Stars
Just yesterday, I was reading an article entitled "Rap Sheet" by Jill Lepore in the latest issue of The New Yorker. In the article, which had gone into the mysteries of Americans propensity to lead the World in per capita murders, I read about the infamous Petit family slayings of Cheshire Connecticut. What startled me most was that these murders of an affluent Doctor's family by two ex-cons mimicked a long ago infamous family murder of the Clutter family on the Kansas plains nearly 50 years before.
Alas, I remember, I read the book! "In Cold Blood" took Truman Capote 5 years to complete. Being an accomplished fictional writer provided no solace for Capote in which he struggled to get the facts and background of the ordeal and to gain the trust of the people of Holcomb Kansas. When Capote was researching and digging into the facts, not only with the town's people but with the convicted murderers themselves, the Author was unsure if he would ever have a book to show for his efforts.
In essence his research and discovery were saved in two places that being in his note taking and what he kept in his brain. In fact Perry Smith, the actual trigger man had asked Capote how the book was progressing. Capote at this time hadn't written a word. Needless to say after giving the Author all he needed to know, this discovery by Smith must have been devastating. In truth all the words spilled forth like a true historical narrative in distinct novel form. The book reads easy in every horrific detail. You can sense the autumn evening and the tension associated with the murders. Everything else flows in a natural and unbelievable transparency of events so common in American murder crimes.
As stated in Lepore's New Yorker article, murders such as these seem to take on an American genre all by itself. Almost 50 years later, and the beat goes on. One thing different though, in Capote's rendition of what happened both Mr. Perry and Mr. Hickock were put on trial, convicted and hanged in just over 5 and one half years. The two ex-cons charged with the murders of the Petit family have yet to go to trial for murders committed over 2 and one half years ago. Our justice system seems to have changed in that time.
Capote's efforts are to be commended and reflect a true American classic narrative of an American murder. This book reflects Capote's genius, and no I don't have enough stars!!!
Book Review: A Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Truman Capote, with major help from Nell Harper Lee, produced groundbreaking work with 1965's In Cold Blood. These days there are probably few readers or film fans not already acquainted with the basic details of the crime upon which Capote based the book: Herb Clutter, his wife and two youngest children, both teenagers, were shot to death in November 1959 in their isolated Holcomb, Kansas, farmhouse. Two petty criminals who had recently been paroled by the Kansas prison system were arrested, convicted of the murders and, almost six years after the killings, finally faced the hangman.
By today's standards, sadly enough, this crime does not seem to have been an extremely brutal or sensational one. But 1959 America was not yet numb to this kind of thing and the crime was reported in detail across the country, even grabbing the attention of novelist and short story writer, Truman Capote in New York City. Capote recognized the potential to turn this crime into a book and, with childhood friend Harper Lee in tow, went to Kansas to do his research. But this time, instead of a novel, Capote may have invented something new: a true crime account that reads more like a novel than it does as nonfiction.
In Cold Blood does a masterful job of describing the murders but, as in any good novel, Capote allows the suspense to build for a long time before he reveals the details of those four horrible deaths. In the meantime he has turned the four victims into real people by providing the details of their everyday lives, their hopes and dreams and what each of them meant to the community in which they lived. When Capote's story finally reaches the final minutes of their lives, the reader is left with a sense of the huge waste that happened at the hands of the two rather shallow sociopaths who destroyed them.
Capote performs the same feat with the two killers, turning them into real people, hard as it is to feel any sympathy for either of them. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock were losers in every sense of the word, two callous sociopaths who felt absolutely no sympathy for anyone they criminally victimized, even the four people they murdered. Although it is never mentioned by Capote in his book, he developed a strong relationship with the two from almost the moment they were returned to Kansas to face their accusers. He was especially taken with Perry Smith, the American Indian runt of the pair, and took advantage of that relationship to gain access to many of Smith's personal photos, journals, letters and drawings. He quotes entire letters and passages from the writings of both Smith and Hickock throughout the book, in fact, but only described the photos and drawings that he obtained from Smith.
Capote's In Cold Blood style has been much copied but has seldom been matched. His melding of a fiction style with a true crime account is so complete that it is very easy to forget the book is not, in fact, a novel. This is the book for which Truman Capote will be forever remembered and, considering that nothing quite like it had ever really been accomplished before, it is truly a masterpiece.