Gangsters, Swindlers, Killers, and Thieves: The Lives and Crimes of Fifty American Villains
$44.39 online at Bookshop.org
Crime novelist Lawrence Block surveys the underside of American history through fifty infamous villains, with biographies drawn from the American National Biography. Some, like Jesse James, Bonnie Parker, and Joe Colombo, lived lives of crime. Others, like John Wilkes Booth, committed one notorious act. Pretty Boy Floyd and Railroad Bill became folk heroes whether or not the myths matched the facts. Ed Gein and Ted Bundy remain forever reviled. Block introduces each life with a writer's eye for character and the strange afterlives of outlaw fame: Leopold running a leprosy hospital after parole, Dutch Schultz in ill-fitting clothes, Black Bart signing poems as PO8. An essay on how Americans invent villains opens a gallery that contrasts desperate realities with the glamor mass culture prefers.
Genres: True Crime
ISBN-13: 9780195169522
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