No comments about Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue.

5 comments about Sins and Needles: A Story of Spiritual Mending.

1. I enjoyed this book because it is a story about real life. It is an unexpected and very atypical story about a person whose life is, for some time, dictated by the disease of addiction. It was a difficult book to put down because the story is compelling and so human.
   
   It is likely that the negative reviews of this book stem from an inability of the reviewer to appreciate the struggle of addicts and the people in their lives and/or an intolerance for folks who write that aren't "writers". Materson is an outsider artist and this book, like his art, lack pretense. It's a great story.



2. Ray Materson was born with the gift of being an artist- a person highly sensitive to pain and to pleasure who could convey these feelings to others. Even when locked up in a jail cell, with nothing to work with, he created his own materials- ironically one of them being a needle (a paraphernalia of the drug trade) and sock threads to create incredible stunning detailed works of depth and beauty of a definite style, snapshots of memory overflowing with feeling. Fortunately an appreciator, who was to become his soulmate and wife, came along and tells his life story with its suffering and its pleasures.
   The glossy pages show the embroideries at their very best. This book is a MUST read for all interested in art as a whole, particularly in embroidery, "Outsider Art", "Raw Art", in teaching, and in realizing how important artistic expression is and how important it is to be there for others as an Appreciator.



3. My good sense tells me that writing this book made the Matersons feel better about themselves. My mind tells me to thank God I never went the way of abuse or criminal activity. My experience tells me we all have a life story to tell. Reading this book showed me most of us do not tell our story to make money or a movie. If the Matersons want money and fame here's some advice: try fiction or learn how to write without being so self-serving.



4. I thought that this book was very well written and quite captivating in that I never put it down until all was read. A peek into a personal life can be very educational and enlightening and I truly believe that this book has helped me to better understand lifes many possible ups and downs and just how important both freedom and love are in a persons life. I very much look forward to the next book by the Matersons and hope that it is soon! I wish them the best in their new life and a hearty pat on the back is in order!



5. The book and the art pictured in the book are overpriced. It's a good thing the Matersons can sell this art because their first attempt at book writing is disappointing. The moral of this story is that while it's good to save oneself from being a criminal others are just not that interested. I suppose the poor sales of the book are due to the fact that either a bad reputation will come back to haunt you or your karma will. Now, that's a high price to pay.

No comments about Martin Cahill - My Father.

5 comments about Breaking Blue.

1. This book is a very well written and an easy read, I was born and graduated highschool, in Spokane,(then I moved on).
   I had spent time in all the areas mentioned in this book, but I still learned alot of good history about the Spokane area reading this book.
   The book perked my interest and even inspired me to look up family tree information, from the time frame of the book. I had an Uncle that hung out at Mothers Kitchen during those times. I wish he was alive now, I would ask him a lot of questions..... Very Interesting.



2. I read this after "The Worst Hard Time". I liked this book much better. It's interesting on many levels. Tim paints a great picture of life in the 30's, and the life of the sherriff. I felt like I knew the characters. I have a theory that sometimes a book/author deserves an award, but the book gets passed up, so the next book gets the award. ;)



3. This was a great story and a very interesting read, because it was a real case that a lawman solved.



4. Mr. Egan has become my favorite non-fiction writer. I've reread The Good Rain several times, and read The Worst Hard Time as soon as it became available in paper back. I live in the Pacific Northwest and have come to appreciate the history that surrounds me. Mr. Egan's hero, Sheriff Bamonte, faced Herculean obstacles, and Mr. Egan presented it beautifully in Breaking Blue. After I finished reading Breaking Blue, I quickly mailed the book to my son who graduated from Gonzaga in 2005 and recommended that he read it since the story takes place in the Spokane area. The Spokane River which runs through downtown Spokane has a new meaning for me now!



5. One of my best recent reads. Part crime story, part historical and cultural biography, and part present-day human drama. All parts are addressed evenly. Great for anyone interested in the sometimes strange land of Eastern Washington and Spokane's Wild West past.

No comments about Karla Faye Tucker en Libertad: Vida y Fe en el Corredor de la Muerte.

2 comments about Cass.

1. 
   As a previous reviewer pointed out; this is not a typical hooligan book its a biography of Cass one of the main members of the IFC one of the most famous hooligan gangs of the 70s and 80s.
   
   The book covers his childhood, being a black child adopted by a white couple and raised in an all white area, the racism he encountered as a kid and how his foster parents taught him pride in who he was and to stand up to anyone. The book then goes into how he got hooked up with the IFC and hooked on the violence that went with it.
   
   The many trials he went through, how he went into bouncing post jail time, how he met his future wife and finaly got his life together metting up with his natural parents back in Jamacia.
   
   Realy interesting read especially his connections with Frank Bruno and Lenny Henry.
   
   Honest book, highly recomended.



2. When i started reading this book i thought it would be about a MORONIC FOOTBALL THUG that all the media wants us to believe they are, but this is how CASS found true friends at West Ham, who didn't care about his colour but just the love of his team and how he grew up amongs racists,football rivals and police prejedice and came out a proud person and a loving parent. Excellent reading

No comments about Outlaw Tales of Wyoming: True Stories of the Cowboy State's Most Infamous Crooks, Culprits, and Cutthroats.

5 comments about The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde.

1. Not as great as I was hoping it would be. Have read better written books on the couple and I have read most of them available.



2. This is my first book on these two and it will not be my last. There is a good bibliography provided to follow up sources of information and other books. As well as being a history book the author delves frequently into his reflections about what made Bonnie and Clyde tick. The author seems determine to provide psychological profiles at regular intervals throughout the book to explain Bonnie and Clyde's actions and decisions and almost tries to get inside their minds. At times l thought why does he bother at others l thought he made some interesting comments. Mr Treherne does a good job of explaining how the folklore of these two developed over the years and endures to this day. Even here in Australia a lot of people know about Bonnie and Clyde, though mainly through the Faye Dunaway movie.
   
   He covers their childhood and family life very well and provides plenty of details of the harsh, poor economic times they lived through and the circumstances of their late teens that led to their fateful meeting which developed into an enduring bond and progression into a life of crime that spiraled into senseless violence and devastation of so many lives. Sometimes there is too much psychological speculation and not enough history as the book seems to skim the surface in some areas and could have dug deeper into the history of Bonnie and Clyde, but the photos and newspaper headlines of the time are great. This book is worth a look!



3. It is great to read how Bonnie and Clyde were able to escape from the law over and over again untill they were gunned down in 1934. They were nothing more than two amateurs who were incredibly lucky.
   
   In the 1967 film there is a scene where they try to rob a bank, discovering that it closed three weeks earlier. Up to now I didn't realize that this actually happened, which shows how well prepared they were commiting these bank robberies. Although the film is pretty accurate, this book gives us more information about the famous couple. It shows how they became legends in American crime history, and became even more famous after their death.
   
   True crime lovers should read this book, because although they were amateurs, they are probably still the most famous couple in the world.



4. WELLL THE BOOK I READ ABOUT WAS SO COOL AND INTRESTING.EVENTHOUGH I ONLY READ A FEW PAGES .I GOT A FEW CAPTATIONS OF THE BOOK ...BASICALLY THE BOOK WAS ABOUT,HOW IN THE LATES 1930'S TWO TO LIVE THEIR ROMANCE BY MAKING CRIMES...THE CHARACTERS OF THIS BOOK WERE BONNIE PARKER AND CLYDE BARROW..WHO WHERE A YOUNG SOCIOPATHIC SOUTHERN COUPLS GUNNED DOWN BY AUTHORITIES AFTER TWO YEARS OF CMMITING CRIME, WHO LEFTED 12 PEOPLE DEAD.THE BOOK WAS ALSO INTRESTING BECAUSE I WAS ABLE IMAGING AND PICTURE MANY OF THE READING THAT I WAS MAKING ....I WOULD RECOMMENED TO READERS WHO LIKE TO READ ABOUT CRIME, TO READ THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT S VERY MYSTIRIOUS AND FUN. THE AUTHOR TELLS THE WHOLE UNEDIFYING STORY FROM WRETCHED CHILDHOOD TO WRECTCH DEATH, BLOODY FAME AND WITH CLARITY, LEVEL HEADEDNESS AND WITH ECONOMY.



5. This is one of those books I rated much more highly when I first read it years ago. It's a "strange history" indeed. It's not always a "straight" history, anyway, dwelling more on psychological speculations about the personalities of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker and on the growth of their legend (with comparisons to older historical and/or folkloric figures such as Jesse James, Robin Hood and even King Arthur) than on a straight recounting of the facts. Movie buffs will be fascinated with the many motion picture adaptations of the Bonnie and Clyde story and that is an interesting segment which Treherne rightly confined, for the most part, to the appendices. He did leave out the 1949 film They Live By Night (Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as Clyde & Bonnie clones) and its 1970's remake Thieves Like Us (Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall) but until Treherne's book I was completely unaware of either the 1939 film Persons in Hiding (one of four bearing this title and based in equal parts on both Bonnie and Clyde and Kathryn and George "Machine Gun" Kelly) or of the 1983 Italian comedy version. But, judging from the title, this book was supposed to be a biography of Clyde and Bonnie and a history of their criminal career. So it is, but little is to found in the historical narrative that is new. Most of it derives from previously published sources such as Jan Fortune's Fugitives and Lee Simmons' Assignment Huntsville, the former an error-ridden work based in equal parts on the recollections of Bonnie's mother and Clyde's sister and (uncredited) on a series of 1934 True Detective articles by Joplin Chief of Detectives Ed Portley, the latter valuable mainly for Simmons' recollections of the Eastham prison break and his recruitment of Frank Hamer and for the statements of gang member Joe Palmer. The confession of W.D. Jones is cited in the bibliography but Treherne seems to have read very little of it. The confession would have made a wonderful appendix, by the way, possibly with comparisons to Jones' 1968 Playboy article, of which Treherne seems completely unaware. Not that Treherne didn't do original research. The chapters on the Stringtown, OK shooting and the Platte City, MO gun battle are based largely on interviews and seem to be accurate accounts. It's a pity he didn't cover the other sites this way. Treherne apparently got no closer to Dexter, IA, the gang's Waterloo, than Des Moines, and missed a lot there. He missed out also on Okabena, MN, the site of a bank robbery Treherne, like previous and later authors, attributed, probably erroneously, to the Barrow gang, and the death site in Louisiana. Details of the final ambush seem to come mainly from the transcripts of Henry Methvin's Oklahoma murder trials and the flawed Ambush account--the ghosted memoirs of Ted Hinton. There is no evidence Treherne ever went near the death site in Bienville Parish. Still, the whole book is an enjoyable read and Treherne wisely used less commonly seen photos than the dozen or so Bonnie and Clyde pix seen in most books on the infamous duo. It is an admirable and worthwhile book. One only wishes it was the straight historical record the title implies. One cannot pschoanylize the dead and the best authorities for the love life of Bonnie and Clyde--whatever the details and whatever dubious historical significance that may entail--died with them. And the growth of the Bonnie and Clyde legend is more suited to a study of folklore than a straight biography.

5 comments about Prison Of My Own: A True Story Of Redemption & Forgiveness.

1. It is a true story. Diane writes with a style that captures your imagination. After my husband read it, he kept referring to is as "the movie". I understand. One can picture the characters, even understand them. Because Diane described the players in an honest and compassionate way, it's easy to imagine forgiving any of their weaknesses. One benefit of describing people that way is that one can identify with each of the characters. We all have our "addictions", our sins, our struggles. Even if we have overcome them sooner, so as not to get caught, we can know just what it feels like to be in this story. In understanding all of the actors in this play, I have learned that others have emotional pain, too, not just me. Diane is the author that should write biographies, and not waste too much time on fiction.



2. Much like the other readers, I could not put this book down. From beginning to end it had my utmost undivided attention. Diane's story was so moving and intense. I couldn't get it out of my mind for weeks. An amazing story of an amazing woman and her power to overcome what some may consider impossible. This book is a great inspiration for those who doubt the power of forgiveness or feel that they can never forgive. This book will truly inspire you.



3. Diane Nichols' scathingly honest portrayal of betrayal and forgiveness is a cautionary tale. When good people do bad things, how do we react? How do we get past the pain and get on with our lives? Though Diane's story is very personal, the life lessons in the book are for everyone.



4. This is a courageously written memoir that bares a woman's soul, an entrancing read that is difficult to put down. Diane Nichols writes this book for any of us who have faced the unforseen, who have longed to speak the unspeakable, who have ached to say what we want to keep hidden in the very depths of our being. By putting into words her deepest thoughts and feelings, she lends courage to the reader, to carry on when life seems unbearable, to live, as she herself says, "a life of redemption and forgiveness." This tale is a deeply personal story with universal themes that can redeem us all from the prisons of our own judgements and doubts. Thank you, Diane!



5. I couldnt put this book down till I got to the end. It is a life changing story of hope and forgiveness. By never giving up, you can heal and you can bring a family back together again after what seemed would be impossible, at one time.

No comments about Thirty Years A Detective.