Sue's Reviews > Battle at Alcatraz: A Desperate Attempt to Escape the Rock

After touring Alcatraz recently, I remembered I had this book hiding on my shelves. I dug it out and read through it. It tells a detailed, well-researched account of the 3-day siege and gun battle in 1946 and was very interesting after having just been there and seen the places detailed in the book. But the writing is rather poor and since it's written by the son of a guard it has a bias that comes out repeatedly. It also had a difficult time trying to decide what it wants to be: researched history or thrilling true-crime book. It's filled with details only an historian could love and which I ate up, but it was interspersed with snippets of inmate dialogue all containing the f-word that seemed jarring in an historical work. It was as though the editor told the writer he needed to do something to spice it up and his response was just to pepper it with profanity that didn't really add to the tension or atmosphere. But the author isn't a professional writer, but a lawyer, so I'm willing to grant him some leeway in telling this full story of the escape attempt and aftermath.