Selected Product:
| In Cold Blood
Hardcover
Author: Truman Capote
Publisher: Modern Library
Release Date: 2002-03-05
ISBN-10: 0375507906
ISBN-13: 9780375507908
List Price: $22.00
Average Customer Rating:
  | |
Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library)
ISBN-10: 067960085X
ISBN-13: 9780679600855
List Price:$14.95
Other Voices, Other Rooms
ISBN-10: 0679745645
ISBN-13: 9780679745648
List Price:$12.95
The Complete Stories of Truman Capote
ISBN-10: 140009691X
ISBN-13: 9781400096916
List Price:$14.00
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (ISBN-10: 0375507906, ISBN-13: 9780375507908).
At this time we have not yet written a review for In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (ISBN-10: 0375507906, ISBN-13: 9780375507908). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged from the crime on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansa.
In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people. It has already been hailed as a masterpiece.
A True-Crime Thriller
| Customer Rating:  | I read this book because it is on the Modern Library's Top 100 Non-Fiction List. I thought for a true crime-drama, that the story was very well written. I think he gives the reader a glance into the mind of a psychopathic murderer. He gives sympathy where sympathy is due; to the unfortunate Clutter family that was tragically murdered. The man who can kill for no reason other than just to experience the thrill of killing, is a man that doesn't deserve to live. The same goes for his accomplice. I was glad in the end when they were hung. Neither man seemed to show any remorse.
Capote is good at giving an unbiased account of the story as well, he seems to tell both sides of the story, from the beginning how the Clutter family lived, to the killers and what motivated them. There's enough information to give the reader, either empathy or profound disgust for the killers. For example when the jurors are deliberating, Capote gives us dialogue from two journalists; one feels sympathy for the murderers, the other only contempt and disgust. But without a doubt when the book is finished the most profound sympathy is for the murdered family, as Dewey imagines how Nancy Clutter would've been as a young beautiful college student. It's tragic, but it also makes for a very good read.
|
Capote brings the 60s alive
| Customer Rating: | | This is my first Capote book and I wasn't disappointed. He has a style best called a page turner. Without confusion he lets the reader progress forward as real events unfold, adds history of an event, and then brings you back in real time. Some writers try this montage effect and only create confusion. Capote weaves the two together and allows the reader to process the sequence of events. Very clever, very readable and a very satisfying read. Would recommend this to any first time Capote reader and you don't have to be an intellectual to enjoy it. |
Crime, punishment, and more
| Customer Rating: | In Cold Blood by Truman Capote was published in 1966, and is based on events that happened almost fifty years ago. The events were real. This is not a work of fiction. The Clutters, an appropriately surnamed Kansas family, have their own complications within their rambling homestead. What family doesn't? Clutter the father is a farmer. Who isn't in these parts? Life is not so productive of late. Whose is? The two younger children, a daughter and a son, still live in. The others have left, happily.
And then, in November 1959, the four Clutters are found gagged, apart from the mother, all with their throats cut and their brains blown out by shotgun fire. The community is in turmoil. No-one can explain why anyone might have wanted to kill a whole family in Holcomb, a small, poor, rural community in the mid-West Bible belt.
Hickock (Hicock) and Smith are two lads on the move. Their families might be dysfunctional. On the other hand they might not. Their socialisation might have been lacking. On the other hand it might not. For whatever reason, individually and collectively they prey on others, prey in a way that renders them culpable, detectable and ultimately punishable. They know thieving is wrong. So, one of them says, we've stolen lives, so it must be serious. It was the two of them that pulled the trigger, that blew brains out, that slit throats, that did not quite commit rape. There are limits. And all for forty dollars and a transistor radio.
I give nothing of this book away when I reveal that the two lads did commit the murders - exactly how no-one ever admitted - and that, after years of litigious wrangling, both were hanged. The strength of In Cold Blood is not what happens, but how it happens.
Truman Capote offers us a vast book in just four sustained chapters, each of which is sub-divided as the narrative shifts between aspects of the different protagonists' lives. Throughout, the style is much more complex than mere journalism, but the clarity with which it communicates is at times breathtaking. We hear from those directly involved, both victims and perpetrators, their families, the police, the judiciary, the neighbours, the lawyers, the passers-by, the acquaintances, the cellmates. The detail is forensic.
It is essential that the reader is constantly reminded that this is not fiction. Truman Capote offers dialogue where a journalist would report, offers interpretation where an historian would defer, offer opinion where an observer might decline. And so In Cold Blood becomes and absorbing, multi-faceted, mid-twentieth century reworking of Crime And Punishment. The crucial difference that the intervening years have generated is that where the latter concentrated on the individual circumstances and motives of the perpetrator, In Cold Blood explores the social and the contextual alongside the psychological.
And this is where the book becomes deeply disturbing, because it seems to suggest that the individuality that contemporary society seems to demand of us might itself promote a degree of self-centredness, of selfishness, perhaps, that might give rise to nothing less than contempt for others. In the forty years since the publication of In Cold Blood, it could be argued that such pressures might have increased. Frightening, indeed.
|
Wow, Great Read!
| Customer Rating: | | Just finished this book and had to write a review for it. It's been years since I've read a book that is so difficult to put down! This was my first book by Capote and I just ordered 2 more by him. It's amazing that this is a true story and Capote is brilliant with his presentation of this gruesome crime story. |
The reputation is well-deserved...
| Customer Rating: | Truman Capote may have been a dwarfish freak-show with a ridiculous voice...but the guy knew how to write. This is an excellent book. Not what I'd call a "masterpiece" along the lines of Lolita, but certainly right up there with Tom Wolfe's best.
It's a book which you should read, and which you'll have no trouble finishing. It may not be 100% factually accurate, but the level of the prose is top-flight, and the pages seemingly turn of their own accord. You can tell Capote spent six years working on it, getting it "just right."
There really isn't much more to say...except that its omission from the MLA 100--a list including such dreck as On the Road--is outrageous. |
|
