Philips has done an admirable job mastering the many sources that went into. researching this book that focuses on one of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s running buddies, Ralph Fults. Philips details the Parker-Barrow crew’s brief exploits in exhaustive and unromantic detail, always keeping one eye on the brutality of the Texas prison system. It was Clyde Barrow’s victimization in Eastham Prison—he was repeatedly beaten and raped as a 15-year-old—that launched him on the outlaw life; his fantasy, once he got out, was a major prison break that would simultaneously help his friends and humiliate the prison guards and administration that brutalized him. All of his and Bonnie’s actions—bank robberies, car thefts, and national guard armory break-ins—were aimed at this goal, at least in their own minds. Philips focuses on the blow-by-blow details of the gang’s confrontation with police and prisons, sometimes neglecting history that would also contextualize their actions. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating look at how a brutalizing penal system created a generation of terrifying criminals in the 1930s.