In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of In Cold Blood
Book Review: An American Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best books I have read in my entire life. My only regret is that I did not read it sooner. This is a true crime masterpiece. Truman Capote painted a masterstroke with every page. He was able to capture this terrible and violent story in such a way that I do not believe that any other author could have done in a million lifetimes. The way he captured the image of that sleepy town, the family who was killed, and everyone involed in the crime from the killers to the investigators was nothing short of extrordinary. Mr. Capote remains un biased from beginning to end. This is a book I plan or reading many more times to remind me what great writing is all about. It was too bad Mr. capote never wrote another true crime piece again because I believe it was his true calling.Book Review: Anarachy in the heartland : an American story
Summary: 5 Stars
An excellent piece of investigative journalism. Although called the first "non-fiction novel" I don't consider it a novel. To do so would suppose that journalism is objective, it is not, and anyway by most accounts Capote mostly got it right. It's gripping journalism, extremely well researched, and very American. The juxtaposition of Capote, a liberal New Yorker, among the conservative mid-westerners should not go unnoticed. It strikes a chord with the American paradoxical character of "the new" versus "stability"; change versus safety; the search for frontier versus authenticity; the fear of anarchy versus the fear of authority; liberal versus conservative. On the one side the ultimate in safety, security and authority is represented by the Clutter family - and on the opposite side the killers, younger and free, represent change, "the new" and anarchy. Capote instinctively tapped into this dialectic and became part of it himself as an upstart homosexual New Yorker in the middle of stable, secure and patriarchal Kansas. This sort of "meta" author mirroring the story is the real aesthetic and creative achievement that has kept it a classic while later "new journalism" works, characterized by their use of literary techniques applied to non-fiction, have rarely if ever exceeded Capote's initial genesis.Book Review: Around crime novels Mr Capote knew the ropes
Summary: 5 Stars
I got interested in reading "In cold blood" as I have found it listed among the 100 best crime novels ever written. Capote beginning from a non fictional event (a murder of a prestigious farmer and his whole family in rural Kansas back in the fifties) creates a great suspenseful work with very great character development dissecting (every victim, every perpetrator, the cops, the officers), and in addition, greatly picturing the setting with just simple colorful words.
The book is centered around action and mystery (murder, perpetrators on the run and the police tracking them).
In final chapters, the author takes his time to balance the action with the introduction of debates about the typical elements of crime (Victims as distinguished members of the local community, perpetrators early destitute life, suitability of the death penalty as punishment, US justice system).
Capote writing style is neat, polished, almost faultless, it is a pleasure to experience how he creates the magic that enthralls the reader pulling him along the whole story. Great writer above all.
Book Review: As Good As I Remember
Summary: 5 Stars
Having just seen the movie "Capote" I decided to reread IN COLD BLOOD and found it every bit as good as I remembered. It certainly reads like a novel without being one, or you can call it a nonfiction novel, a new hybrid form that Mr. Capote said he invented. As practically everybdy in the world now knows, the author researched and wrote a stunning account of the murders of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959, conducting countless interviews with everyone involved and attending the executions of the murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. There is a myriad of details about both the four members of the Clutter family and Smith and Hickock as well as the law enforcement officials involved in solving the crime. Mr. Capote manages to pull together a lot of otherwise extraneous material and by his genius makes it relevant-- all the information about the other men on death row a/k/a "The Corner," for example. The author is famous for his clear, transparent prose very much in evidence here. That is not to say that he is not a master of metaphor as well. Hickock's father is described by Capote as having "faded, defeated eyes" And his mother "throughout the trial. . . had sat quietly beside her husband, her hands worrying a rumpled handkerchief." And Capote's description of spring on the day of the Clutter auction: "Actually, it was a beautiful day. Spring. Though mud abounded underfoot, the sun, so long shrouded by snow and cloud, seemed an object freshly made, and the trees-- Mr. Clutter's orchard of pear and apple trees, the elms shading the lane-- were lightly veiled in a haze of virginal green." A multitude of such sentences abounds throughout this book.
In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of IN COLD BLOOD Bob Colacello credits Capote with influencing Tom Wolf, Gay Talese, Bruce Chatwin, Ryszard Kapuscinski, James Ellroy and John Berendt. Such a statement may indeed by true; on the other hand no writer following Capote has done this sort of writing better. I can imagine his comments about, say, Bob Woodward's quoting in his books the thoughts of people verbatim whom he had never interviewed or Berendt's projecting himself into a scene in MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL and witnessing a shooting when in reality he was not present. To paraphrase what Capote supposedly said about Norman Mailer, these writers will never beat him at his own game.
Book Review: Better Than The Film
Summary: 5 Stars
The reason for wanting to read this book came from seeing the film "Capote". It is completely riveting and a must have for any home library.