Monday, August 01, 2016

Book Review - Texas Ranger, The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, The Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde



Texas Ranger, The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, The Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde is the best biography of a single Texas Ranger I have ever read.  As my readers know, I am a big fan of historians who rely on primary sources and John Boessenecker has done an incredible amount of research into previously unexplored archival sources.  Usually books on the Texas Rangers are collections of the same well worn stories repeated over and over again. In some of these you might find a couple of paragraphs relating the same old stories about Frank Hamer, but that is about it. From a Texas Ranger on horseback in the Texas Hill Country, to fighting bandits on the Texas border, to the killing of Bonnie and Clyde on the backroads of Louisiana, to Hamer's later years, Boessenecker brings us an incredibly detailed picture of the man who became a Texas and an American legend. Texas Ranger, The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, The Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde is the most complete biography of a Texas Ranger ever produced. Boessenecker’s detailed description of the killing of Bonnie and Clyde is also the most detailed description of this event I have ever read and is worth the price of the book all by itself. But there is so much more, lots more! Many hours of fascinating reading about at least two distinct periods in Texas history that are now gone forever.

Published by Thomas Dunne Books and available at Amazon and fine book stores everywhere. Review by Kameron K. Searle