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Whistle Stopper - In Cold Blood
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $7.24
Your Save: $ 6.76 ( 48% )
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.15230978144
EAN: 9780679745587
ISBN: 0679745580
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 1994-02-01
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1994-02-01
Studio: Vintage
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Crime, punishment, and more
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wow, Great Read!
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The reputation is well-deserved...
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Compelling and Engrossing
Comment: From beginning to end, I found this book to be one of the most compelling stories I've ever read. Truman Capote reconstructs this true life story in a way only a master storyteller can. He weaves the plot together in sequential order, allowing the reader to experience the crime and its aftermath just as the Kansas community did. Further, his character development is utterly flawless. I found myself haunted by the book long after I closed its cover. This account demonstrates Capote's immense talent as a writer, and it is a must read for those wishing to become familiar with Capote and those who enjoy true crime accounts or engrossing non-fiction.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: SHODDY PRINTING Will Give You Motion Sickness
Comment: Wanted my own copy of this book that passed around the neighborhood and my teenaged friends in paperback form in the 1960s. UNFORTUNATELY, the botched print job with its lines slanting below the horizontal and its v-shaped interior margins make me nauseated. It's not even a decent pinchbeck. I'd rather have our old creased, rumpled, greasy, coming loose paperback.
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Editorial Reviews:
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"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.
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