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This book, found along with a few others at Value Village in Ballard (Seattle), is the one which inspired me to start this blog. Before I stumbled upon it, I had no interest in outlaws or tales of the Old West. The book has a thesis, which is that there was a long continuous line of criminality spanning several generations starting with Civil War mercenary raiders in Missouri and leading all the way through bootlegging and bankrobbing gangsters of the 1930s. The basic idea is that a member of one gang would spin off to start a new gang, and so on down through the decades, creating a family tree of banditry. Often the reason for spinning off was that the old gang was wiped out either through shootouts or imprisonment. The history it traces includes such household names as Jesse James, Belle Star, and Pretty Boy Floyd.
Well, that's the thesis anyway, but it struck me that that was just an excuse to describe a score of robberies, gunfights, and manhunts in loving, minute detail. For the most part this book reads like an action adventure shoot-em-up which is made all the more arresting for being based in historical fact.
Rating: 5 out of 6 bullets.
Buy this book at amazon.com.
