The best you can hope for from a biographer is that he/she keeps the narrative moving, provides ample details without burying the reader, and remains objective about his subject. Jeff Guinn checks all the boxes here. He ties everything together so seamlessly about Bonnie and Clyde that it's only at the end of the book I realized all the effort that went into piecing together unreliable sources into a coherent story. Bonnie and Clyde became famous to a newer generation thanks to the movie, but the truth was far different--everything except their loyalty to each other and fatalism about dying in a hail of bullets. But Guinn, to his credit, doesn't dwell on the film or its inaccuracies, simply advising readers to watch it for entertainment, not historical, value. Bonnie and Clyde grew up dirt poor in the slums of West Dallas. Both were physically very small people. Initially I felt a little sympathy for Clyde, whose childhood is covered in more depth here than Bonnie's. He came from a Christian family and tried to work straight jobs but would never get ahead in life no matter how hard he worked. I could at least see his motive for turning to crime. It was a practical solution for Clyde, a high-school dropout. Bonnie was smarter but followed Clyde and romanticized crime. Clyde started as a car thief, eventually being sent to prison and the infamous work farm in Texas, where he committed his first murder, killing another convict who repeatedly raped him. Clyde was hardened into a career criminal in prison. He cut off two of his own toes to be free of it but afterwards was constantly harassed by police, keeping him from holding a straight job. Bonnie and Clyde had a rotating crew but were bad at crime. They did a lot of petty holdups, and even their bank robberies were for small amounts. They likened themselves to other well-known criminals of the era but were not in that league. They spent a lot of time driving around and sleeping in stolen cars in fields and bathing in streams. They were always on the run. Clyde was lauded as a great driver, but he always drove too fast. At one point he drove off the road, causing Bonnie's leg to be permanently mangled in the accident. He killed a lot of people, mostly police. There ended up being nothing redeemable about him except perhaps his loyalty to Bonnie, family, and friends. But then he trusted the convict who conspired to lead him into the ambush with police. I came away thinking that both Bonnie and Clyde were resigned to their fate but were also very naive. They believed too much of the hype from newspapers and thought that somehow they would overcome their circumstances, all the while being hunted. They believed in their own luck because they had shot their way free in a couple standoffs, even while other gang members were shot, including Clyde's brother, who was killed. They ultimately spread their bad luck to everyone around them, infecting their families. There was nothing glamorous about their lives, and Guinn's is a depressing story told well.