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Loading... In Cold Bloodby Truman Capote
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 1   nwhyte | Oct 27, 2009 |  I'm in awe of Capote's ability to take a factual story in which the ending is known at the beginning and spin it into an engaging novel. (  )1 alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | I'm in awe of Capote's ability to take a factual story in which the ending is known at the beginning and spin it into an engaging novel. ( ) alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | I'm in awe of Capote's ability to take a factual story in which the ending is known at the beginning and spin it into an engaging novel. ( ) alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | Reviewed by Nell (Class of 2010) Chilling! Amazing! Creepy! Unique! ( ) HHS-Students | Oct 22, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679745580, Paperback)"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I don't read much true crime, though I am as fascinated as anyone by the story of human wickedness. This seemed to me a particularly good (and early) example of the genre, with Capote following events through the stories of the victims, the investigators and the perpetrators, from just before it happened to the day of the executions. The crimes in question took place fifty years ago next month, when the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, were murdered by two men who had recently been paroled from the state prison. Capote devotes a lot of the book to a not unsympathetic psychological portrait of Hickock and Smith, the two killers; though the description of the Kansas environment where the Clutter family lived and died (based partly on notes by Harper Lee, who had just finished writing To Kill A Mockingbird) is also rather memorable. The book was originally published as a series of long articles in The New Yorker, and retains a couple of journalistic touches; the most intrusive of these is that Capote can't quite decide to keep himself out of the picture he is creating. I see that there have been two recent films about how Capote wrote this book, which is somehow not surprising. (