Carl ChinnPeaky Blinders: The Real Story: The real story behind the next generation of British gangsters

Just as described!

Book is just what I ordered

This is a terrible book. Poorly written. Confusing details. Much unnecessary history. Pictures are interesting.i usually save a book when I have finished reading it. This one I threw away in the trash!

Great delivery times, however the product is clearly not new. I purchased this for a gift but I don't wish to gift a used book... And I definitely over paid for a used book.

This book is very poorly written. It follows no chronologic order. It does not introduce individuals in any systematic way and simply states their role or comment without any context. It repeats most facts multiple times. There is no in depth description of any gang members, fights, confrontations. It simply states cursory facts about gangs in England and describes that the series is not consistent with the true history of the peaky blinders.

Purchased this as a Christmas gift for my boyfriend. He normally enjoys historical non-fiction, & he loves the series.He’s rated the book 1 star- “The writing was terrible, I felt like the author just milked the series for a book. The information was drawn out more than it needed to be”

This book really offered little interesting.

Terribly written, not what I expected. Do not recommend.

Interesting read

era para regalo lo termine cogiendo en español y a mi amigo le hizo mucha ilusion como fan de la serie

Great book if you like the series and want to learn something about the backgrounds and the real story.

If anything, the author hates them and the show. At least that's the idea you get when he (barely) mentiones them. On the other hand, he seems to tollerate them enough to use a picture that looks theirs to sell his dreadfully boring book. At least he's had one clever idea, clever enough to get me to buy this pile of useless paper.

This book is an extended text version of Professor Carl Chinn’s lecture and street tour about the real Peaky Blinders, of which I’ve had the pleasure. If you don’t know Professor Chinn, he’s a yampy but bostin community historian and pretty much the brummiest brummie you’ll ever meet.Both the lecture – if he’s still doing it – and the book are worth your time, but they both have the same flaw. They’re a muddle.Professor Chinn likes to circle a point and fact-bomb it into submission, rather than make it and move on. He has a strong interest in the historical oral record, and the book is a lot like the transcriptions of personal recollections he includes. It’s a stream of consciousness with no clear through-line. Dates whiz past thick and fast but not necessarily in the right order, so the timeframe is never clear. And the sheer weight of loosely connected micro-facts is overwhelming.The writing is earnest but incredibly dense and clunky. To pad out the original lecture there’s a lot of extra, repetitive material drawn from old police and court records. Some is quoted clearly, but there are obvious lumps of stodgy period material upcycled without quote marks. There’s a lot of “indeed …” and “whilst …”, like someone trying to imitate academic style. Professor Chinn’s energetic personality has been stripped away, and it’s a shame for what’s not really an academic book.A better editor should have taken care of this, like they should have picked up on road-bumps in the text like random repeated words and phrases.The book is a treasure trove of interesting information, it just takes a lot of digging where a more creative hand on the tiller could have drawn it out. For instance, the TV show’s version of peaky blinders is actually the result of OG “fake news”, a mixture of deliberate fabrication and historians and journalists playing Chinese Whispers. But ironically, Birmingham in the mid to late 19th century really does seem to have been a ringer for the 20th century urban ganglands we know from TV shows like The Wire.All of this is passed over or buried “below the fold”.It’s a shame because you’ll never find a book with a more obviously deep, honest and passionate interest in Birmingham’s history or sheer weight of detail about the real peaky blinders. If you’re buying for kindle and you have the extra cash, you should take the Whispersync option. The audio will paper over some of the cracks.