Joe Bob BriggsRezensionen

True Crime is my guilty pleasure genre. I read a couple of them every year. This one was rather boring but I slogged through it anyway. Apparently there wasn't enough information to make it long enough so they went into a lot of unnecessary details. I didn't really need to know the life story of the defense attorney or the church pastor as it really had nothing to do with the case.

Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs by John Bloom is a 2016 Open Road Media publication.(Originally published in 1984)

This is another older true crime story- one that I had forgotten about until I started reading this book. I was about a quarter of the way in when it finally came to me why everything sounded so familiar. In fact, I think I may have even read this book many, many years ago.

Although this case has been out of the spotlight for a good while- my understanding is that both Hulu and HBO are planning mini-series about it. The HBO series is based on this book, as it so happens.

Despite the age of the case and this book-it is still an incredible and riveting drama. It’s got all the elements that drive people to commit crimes of passion- but the way this investigation played out was so unusual- I have never heard anything like it since.

The crime takes place in 1980 when Betty Gore was brutally murdered- on Friday the 13th, no less, while her husband was away on a business trip.

One of the last people to see Betty alive was her friend, Candy Montgomery, who had stopped by earlier in the day. As the police begin their investigation, it comes to light that the two church -going families had a few secrets between them- secrets which may have culminated in murder.

The book follows a format common in true crime books of this era. Background is given about the families involved, the reader is walked through how Betty’s body was found, the days following her murder, and the subsequent revelations that eventually led to a shocking outcome, a sensational murder trial, and a stunning jury decision.

Although the story was familiar to me, I had forgotten many of the details. As I re

ad further, I found myself completely engrossed.

So, it might be a good time to brush up on this case before you watch the new series about it. (In the meantime- you can watch 'A Killing in a Small Town on YouTube.)

This book was very well written and organized. The layout is very effective, even now, when we are so accustomed to true crime reading like fiction.

Overall, I give this one the five star treatment. True crime fans don’t miss this one!

This should have been fiction. The ending was so unbelievable. I couldn't wrap my head around it. Read this and you'll be book hungover too. Crazy that this was a true story.

I don't know how complexly accurate this book was, but as an Iridium fan during the 90s, and and Iridium customer in the 2000s, it was a pretty amazing behind the scenes view. I knew Motorola was a cancer and an anachronism, but had no idea how deep the dysfunction was within the company -- thankfully they are no longer around. I have a lot more experience with the startup stage than with the turnaround of billion dollar assets, but there were a lot of similarities, and it is hard to come away with hunting but respect for the team that rescued Iridium and kept it operating.

Should have been half as long.

If this had been confined to the trial it would rate 4 stars. However, the authors decided to go with a more "Lifetime Movie" scenario and the book bogs down accordingly. I also, felt the authors were pretty much rooting for the defendant. The judge was extremely unprofessional however. He tried to intimidate the defense attorney at every opportunity and that reflects badly on him. If you watched and enjoyed the series "Madmen" and many did. Then you might like this much more than I did. One reason I didn't like Madmen was t h e show was just a glorified soap opera. I liked it when it was on the agency and the time period. But, the soap bored me to say the least. Same with this book. They could have hit on the affairs and moved on. Instead the authors went on and on about childhood incidents and teenage/young women in "luv." (Mild spoiler alert)

Finally I was completely shocked at the verdict. If the authors are correct then the act of sexual intercourse is much more damming in a Texas woman's mind than brutally killing another human.

I tried so hard to finish this book for book club. I made it halfway and I can’t make it no more. It’s well written and the author really does a good job of adding drama to a very dry subject (so that’s why 2 stars instead of 1), but it turns out that I don’t give a damn about white dudes spending BILLIONS on their private curiosity/science experiment, going bankrupt so that the taxpayers pick up the bill, and still trying to find a market for their overkill product so that they can make bank. Holy shit. I can’t take the arrogance and audacity of this group of “leaders” anymore.

Fascinating study of one of the most important and complex technological achievements since the Manhattan Project. This book is far more interesting than I expected, covering (in layman's terms) the engineering hurdles, the financing, the world-wide international politics and the corporate in-fighting that was overcome to get the satellites launched. Then, after the initial phone failed, how it was rescued from bankruptcy by an unlikely band of disparate visionaries and evolved into a system that is the future of air traffic and other services in 2019.

The author makes each of these issues understandable and brings the various personalities involved to life. I was reluctant to put the book down at times as I HAD to see how they overcame each seemingly insurmountable opposition.

The closest thing I could compare this to would be Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine where the development of a revolutionary computer occurred against corporate in-fighting, which seems a simple task in comparison.

A very enjoyable read.

Gaming the Book
A game to play the difficulties in achieving basic space missions is Leaving Earth. The financing of a large engineering task could be played in Age of Steam (although not as interestingly as it is in the book). I don't know of a game that captures the seemingly-random bureaucratic nightmare of international politics except perhaps Diplomacy.

A moderately amusing collection of short articles on everything from air miles to funeral costs. I think that "Joe Bob" takes a little while to get going, his best on-air rants got better as he got worked up and this book contains just a couple stories longer than 3-4 pages and they're the best in the book. I laughed out loud at his need for AK-47s to hunt prairie dogs, especially as the story got rolling about tactics and previous encounters with the wily beasts. Most of the other, shorter stories made me smile.½

This was much more interesting than I expected it to be. Essentially a history of how a business was saved by Dan Colussy.

This is the second collection of Jo Bob Briggs' review columns from previous years, which often feels more like a humor column than a film review. If you've never read Joe Bob's stuff before, be prepared for plenty of colorfully folksy diatribes mixed in with tongue-in-cheek reviews of low-budget drive-in movie fodder. Since it was never meant to be read in more than one or two page snippets, his style can become a bit exhausting when plowing through a full volume of it, so I'd recommend tearing off a bite here and there. But I do recommend it.

This is a film nerd book for film nerds, and I always forget how much I hate film nerds until I spend too much time with them. Totally aside from the almost aggressive lack of perspective - Shaft is a great movie because Shaft isn't really black! Unforgiven can't possibly be as good a movie as The Wild Bunch because it has a feminist undertone! - this book isn't really interested in how movies changed history (or even just movies) as much as it's interested in what's shocking. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but wasn't what I was looking for.½

A collection of Joe Bob Briggs newspaper columns. I read this over time, since it made a great "bathroom book". John Bloom as Joe Bob has a wacky sense of humor that may not be for everyone (aka those easily offended), but was great for me. I laughed throughout the book.

I've wasted my time on worse. The author is from Krankaway County, Texas, where the chief industry is "dirt". "We have more dirt per capital than any county in Texas." It has "special commercial dirts for your dirt-consuming industries".

Evidence of Love", by John Bloom and Jim Atkinson , is about a real-life axe murder that took place several years ago in Texas.

it has great reviews on amazon and I am definitely looking forward to reading this one.

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on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 I wrote...


Very interesting read. Different than the normal true crime books.
You will find out only at the end of the book what really happened.
Very well written and a book I recommend for any true crime reader.

Completed this yesterday. January 29th 2008
4.5 stars out of 5

Normally, I don't read books about movies, but Joe Bob's name on the cover got me to pick this one up. I've spent many an hour watching Joe Bob hosting cable movies - even if the movies were dreadful. And, after hearing him describe the plot of Ghosts Can'T Do It - and then confirming the awful truth - I trust him completely to accurately sum up a movie. Which I have to since I haven't seen a single one of the films he concentrates on.

Those ten movies are "sexy movies", not porn movies. Only one of them can remotely be called that. Each chapter covers one movie, its history, its significance, and the careers of the significant people associated with it. Brief chapters in between cover other contemporary films with sexual themes.

The Sheik (1921), based on the rape fantasy of the very successful eponymous novel, is forever linked to Rudolph Valentino - the man who upped the bar for what American women wanted in their lovers. And haughty, domineering, graceful (and clean) alpha males in the desert became a stock fixture in romance novels.

She Done Him Wrong (1933), a remake of Mae West's stage show Diamond Lil, was something of a last hurrah before the Hays Production Code went into effect. West's persona - little skin, lots of innuendo (shocking then, more amusing now), with an act lifted from drag queens and portraying an unapologetic prostitute and exploiter of men - was very influential even if few outright imitations were tried.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) was writer-director Preston Sturges' comedic end run around Hays Office censorship. A highly cynical movie that started with the phenomena of the unintended pregnancies of "V-girls", women who slept with soldiers right before they were shipped overseas, and then went on to mock most of the institutions of WW II America. The Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the movie but also noted "... it was very funny".

Picnic (1955) was a story that obsessed its writer Daniel Taradash. He never bought that its protagonist, Kim Novak, playing a woman in a Kansas small town, would really find happiness by running off with William Holden's drifter. Taradash continued to tinker with the story, but no one wanted what he thought was the more realistic version. They wanted the movie version with its alleged happy ending. Briggs, however, contends that the movie fascinates because audiences sensed the movie was really, whatever they told themselves, about how "sex kills everything it touches".

The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), the closest thing to a true porn movie here, was the advent of the "content-free sex film". Russ Meyer's film -- about large breasted women as all Russ Meyer's movies are -- enabled national film distributors to book movies with lots of nudity without the packaging of foreign language "art cinema".

Contempt (1963) was Jean-Luc Godard's chilly effort, starring Jack Palance, Brigitte Bardot, Fritz Lang, and Michel Piccoli, about unconsummated passion, a love affair unraveling.

Kitten with a Whip (1964) has Ann-Margret showing up with thuggy friends to bedevil John Forsythe, a middle-aged businessman, with her sex-drenched presence and threats of violence. Long considered something of an embarrassment - no legitimate dvd release has been made in America, Joe Bob argues that it was the high point of Ann-Margret's career.

I Am Curious - Yellow (1967) paved the way for Deep Throat's breaking down obscenity laws. A narratively complicated satire, with explicit sex, on left-wing Swedish politics, it also made "Swedish movie" and "porn movie" synonymous in the American mind.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), with its equation of one-night stand=dead woman, affected a generation of single women argues Joe Bob. Little seen today, its title is still shorthand for a moral lesson - even if the moral lesson isn't at all clear in the actual movie.

9 1/2 Weeks (1986) is the most recent movie on the list and still fresh in the public mind. Notorious for allegedly being about B&D or S&M, it seems lacking in all but maybe the D. Joe Bob argues, given the plot and Mickey Rourke's gifts to Kim Bassinger, it's a chick flick for the Bondage Lite set.

Joe Bob's prose does not much resemble his tv persona. That Joe Bob wouldn't talk about Strasberg or Meisner schools of acting. It's much like his John Bloom voice - clear, frankly subjective in places, and informative.

If I have one problem with this book, it's that the title - copying Joe Bob's preceding book, Profoundly Disturbing: The Shocking Movies that Changed History - oversells the significance of some of these movies whatever their artistic merits. Miracle at Morgan's Creek may be a classic screwball comedy, but did it really have any influence on the public or future filmmakers however popular it was? Contempt doesn't even seem to have been that popular, until decades later, with filmmakers much less the public. Picnic may be an interesting look at adult romance and sexual attraction but how did it change things?

Still, I enjoyed the book for what it was, not what it promised, and I'll be checking out some of these movies.

Fun from start to finish as Briggs looks at bad movies as only a sex-and-violence obsessed man can. It doesn't matter if you've seen the films or not. In fact, he could have just made the whole thing up and it would still be a classic. No coincidence that, like Joe Lansdale, he hails from Texas.

Candy Montgomery kills Betty Gore with an ax, striking her 41 times, claiming self defense! A must-read for any true crime fans. The writing is excellent and the story is truly engrossing. This is one story that is so incredible, and the writing so in depth and descriptive that you'll find yourself wanting to discuss this case with anyone who will listen.½

JBB reviews a handfull of breakthrough movies in cinema history -- at least as far as the exploration of sex is concerned. Starting with Valantino and Mae West, JBB proceeds chronologically in exhaustive and exhausting detail through the eighties.

Historical review of a handfull of movies that were considered shocking at the time they were released. JBB goes into exhausting, occasionally academic detail on the directors and actors involved, so although the book only officially covers a few films, you might end up with a significant list once you're done reading. I'll admit my eyes tended to glaze, though.