Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records Braille and Talking Books Division
Link to Agency Home Link to Agency Home Link to Braille and Talking Book Library Division

WELCOME TO BOOK TALK

This location presents Arizona Braille and Talking Book Readers
with book summaries and reviews suggested by our readers, staff, and volunteers.
Also provided will be recent library news.

(Writer’s note: Always looking for a great movie, this Reader Advisement Librarian took a chance on a film not largely reviewed - at least at the time I saw it. “Capote” starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman (in a likely Oscar nomination performance) was truly remarkable. This outstanding flick was based on the extensive research and writing of Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood. After such a stunning cinematic discovery and seeing how both Truman Capote and Harper Lee, the noted Pulitzer Price winning author of To Kill A Mockingbird – RC 36414 on two cassettes and narrated by Carole Jordan Stewart – spent years interviewing the murder suspects, the legal investigators, and scores of people who knew the victims – I just had to read the book. Especially since the movie suggests Capote’s personal involvement in researching In Cold Blood was largely responsible for ending his writing career and exacerbating his alcoholism which eventually brought about his death.)

 

Book Review:

IN COLD BLOOD : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
RC 22726
By Truman Capote
410 pages on three cassettes
Narrated by Roy Hagen

FROM THE BOOK JACKET

“In Cold Blood created a sensation when it was published serially in The New Yorker in 1965. It is Capote’s masterpiece. The laconic, atmospheric, and intensively researched narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the ‘new journalism.’

Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. ‘I thought he was a very nice gentleman,’ he says of Herb Cutter. ‘Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.’

Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost as if he were a participant in the events.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Parsons on September 30,1924 in New Orleans. His early years were affected by an unsettled family life. He was turned over to the care of his mother’s family in Monroeville, Alabama; his father was imprisoned for fraud; his parents divorced and they fought a bitter custody battle over Truman. Eventually he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, a Cuban businessman whose name he adopted. The young Capote got a job as a copyboy at 'The New Yorker' in the early forties, but was fired for inadvertently offending Robert Frost. The publication of his early stories in Harper’s Bazaar established his literary reputation when he was in his twenties, and his novel Other Voice, Other Rooms (1948), a Gothic coming-of-age story that Capote described as ‘an attempt to exorcise demons,’ and novella The Grass Harp (1951), a gentler fantasy rooted in his Alabama years, consolidated his precocious fame.

From the start of his career Capote associated himself with a wide range of writers and artists, high-society figures, and international celebrities, gaining frequent media attention for his exuberant social life. He collected his stories in A Tree of Night (1949) and published the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), but devoted his energies increasingly to the stage- adapting The Grass Harp into a play and writing the musical House of Flowers (1954) – and to journalism, of which the earliest examples were Local Color (1950) and The Muses Are Heard (1956). He made a brief foray into the movies to write the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1954).

Capote’s interest in the murder of a family in Kansas led to the prolonged investigation that provided the basis for In Cold Blood (1966), his most successful and acclaimed book. By ‘treating a real event with fictional techniques,’ Capote intended to create a new synthesis: something both ‘immaculately factual’ and a work of art. However its genre was defined, from the moment it began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker the book exerted a fascination among a wider readership than Capote’s writing had ever attracted before. The abundantly publicized masked ball at the Plaza Hotel with which he celebrated the completion of In Cold Blood was an iconic event of the 1960s, and for a time Capote was a constant presence on television and in magazines, even trying his hand at movie acting in Murder by Death.

He worked for many years on Answered Prayers – RC 26876 on one cassette and narrated by Noah Siegel, an ultimately unfinished novel that was intended to be the distillation of everything he had observed in his life among the rich and famous; an excerpt from it published in Esquire in 1975 appalled many of Capote’s wealthy friends for its revelation of intimate secrets, and he found himself excluded from the world he had once dominated. In his later years, he published two collections of fiction and essays, The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980) – RC 16850 on two cassettes and narrated by Ray Hagen. He died on August 25, 1984, after years of problems with drugs and alcohol.

(The above taken in entirety from the preface of The Complete Stories of Truman Capote – currently in production as RC 59446 narrator to be announced – as written and edited by Reynolds Price. Reynolds Price is a Professor of English at Duke University and has written several books also available on cassette from The Arizona State Braille and Talking Book Library.)

ABOUT THE NARRATOR

Ray Hagen (winner of the prestigious Alexander Scourby Award in 2000 for outstanding narration) was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1936. Roy notes that he first thought he wanted to be a cartoonist or illustrator. However, being raised in Manhattan, he quickly became fascinated with acting, dancing, and singing. In 1957 Hagen started a career in off Broadway productions. Besides touring as Riff in West Side Story, he did bit parts in movies, sang in cabarets and even did some chorus dancing on TV. He also did some writing for film magazines and wrote two plays which were done off-Broadway.

In 1972 Ray decided to make a major change in his life and moved to Washington D.C. A year after arriving he got a part-time position as a narrator at the Library of Congress, recording Talking Books. This turned out to be a real love affair and in the course of his narrating career Hagen narrated some 450 books for The National Library Service before retiring in 2001.

READER CRITIQUE

When you start reading In Cold Blood it won’t take long to realize it is truly unique. In fact, if you had no previous knowledge of Capote or information about this book, massive confusion might result. Are you reading an exciting crime novel or the retelling of a true life gruesome multi-murder? This type of reader reaction is exactly what the author hoped to produce. As Capote stated he had no intention of just retelling facts but wanted to create a work of art, one that would utilize fictional techniques in the retelling of a startling real life event. To accomplish this, Capote selected the mass murder of the Clutter family on November 15th, 1959 in Holcomb Kansas and went about relating the murders as though he were composing a fictional adventure novel.

There is little doubt that Capote accomplished this incredible feat, especially since the critics claim it to be a hallmark in the field of journalism. However, this reviewer had some difficulties with the often flowery and bombastic style of Capote’s narrative. While the exhaustive research of the crime (which took place over a four year period by both Capote and Lee) is immediately apparent one still gets a kind of ‘chatty’ relating of events that sometimes distracts the reader’s attention and challenges his patience. Yet, all in all In Cold Blood is so creative that it becomes a must read.

NARRATOR CRITIQUE

As a New Yorker by birth – born in Brooklyn, it is amazing that Ray Hagen narrates this book with accents appropriate to the locale of the characters. For example, when Capote is writing in the first person narrative Hagen’s voice sounds like a cross between a Southerner and New Yorker (Capote was raised in South but lived for some time in New York City). When Ray is the voice of citizens in Holcomb, Kansas he provides a plains mid-western twang. This amazing ability makes his narration both fascinating and memorable.

Library News

With 2005 coming to a close it is practically a library tradition to run our “High Demand Titles Circulation Report.”  It’s kind of like waiting to see which university football teams are chosen for the top bowl games.  No, our top circulating book was not “Southern Cal verses Texas In The Rose Bowl” but “The Da Vinci Code”  by Dan Brown ( RC 55735 on 3 cassettes and narrated by Jack Fox).  The other top ten circulation getters were:  2)  The Sinister Pig by Tony Hillerman (RC 56045 narrated by Bob Askey on 1 cassette), 3) The Cottage by Danielle Steel (RC 53988 narrated David Hartley-Margolin on 2 cassettes), 4) Safe Harbor by Danielle Steel (RC 57100 narrated by Gabriella Cavallero on 2 cassettes), 5) Bleachers by John Grisham (RC56894 narrated by Nick Sullivan on 1 cassette), 6) The Cat Who Talked Turkey by Lilian Jackson Braun (RC 57377 narrated by Bob Askey on 1 cassette), 7) Johnny Angel by Danielle Steel (RC 56483 narrated by Gabriella Cavallero on 1 cassette), 8) Echoes by Danielle Steel (RC 58832 narrated by Simon Prebble on 2 cassettes), 9) The Future Scrolls by Fern Michaels (RC 57364 narrated by Michel Schaeffer on 2 cassettes), and 10) The King of Torts by John Grisham (RC 55167 narrated by Fred Major on 2 cassettes).

There was no question that the top voter getter for the 2005 college football season – at least prior to the bowl games- was The University of Southern California. Here at the Arizona State Braille and Talking Book Library there was no doubt that the top circulating author for the 2005 season was Danielle Steel!!!

(Comments and questions regarding “BookTalk” should be
directed to Reader Advisement Librarian Henry Hayden at hhayden@lib.az.us)

 

top of page

Updated:  10/6/2006

E-mail website
comments to:
webedits@lib.az.us