Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #218679 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 343 pages

Customer Reviews

A genuine classic
This is one of these books that everyone tells you is a classic. Personally speaking, that sort of recommendation always puts me off, but having seen and loved the film "Capote" I thought I should give the book a go and boy, am I glad I did!

The story is a harrowing one, and in the hands of a less skilled writer its telling could have become overwrought. Capote's greatest skill is his ability to keep his emotions in check, avoiding making judgements, just telling the facts as best he can and as a result allowing all of his characters to come to life on the page. The Clutter family are not canonized, but instead shown as real people, all with their own problems, hopes and fears. Smith and Hickock, though never excused by Capote, are shown as three dimensional, flawed human beings rather than two dimensional monsters.

Reading this book was an emotional experience. You are left feeling sad and shocked, yet with a sense of hope. It is a book that will stay with me for a long time and one that truly deserves to be called a classic.

Gruesome, captivating and tragic
This really is essential reading for everyone over the age of about 14. A classic. Truman Capote recounts the story of the murders of four members of the Clutter family, one November night in 1959, and provides details of the events leading up to the murders, what the killers (Dick and Perry) did whilst on the run, their arrest, trial and punishment. I real a lot of books, but this is one of the best I've ever read and I couldn't put it down - despite knowing it doesn't have a happy ending for anyone, I wanted to know what actually happened to the Clutters and why. This book doesn't try to psychoanalyse murders - it tells the story in a factual way, but written like a novel, and it is fantastic, gruesome and tragic because it's true. Six people died as a result of that night - let Truman tell you how.

Chilling real life murder
This differs completely from Capote's other famous work Breakfast At Tiffany's and is as dark in tone as the other is playful. It must be the best of "real life" crime books and spawned a genre that includes such books as Burn's Happy Like Murderers or Sereny's The Story Of Mary Bell. But ICB eclipses these more recent attempts through Capote's style that refuses to sentimentalise but shows the players in the crime as real people. The murderers are shown to be unpleasant men, not devils or divorced from reason- the realization that such people may be living in any society unknown to the rest of us is what makes this book so sinister.
Capote, fortunately, does no overstate the violence or in any way glamorise it. What the end leaves us with is the monumental sense of life wasted- both of those killed, those left behind and those who perpetrated the murders.