The Outlaw Youngers: A Confederate Brotherhood

First-time author Brant, a Georgia TV writer and producer, claims to have spent more than two decades researching the four Younger brothers--Bob, Cole, Jim and John--ex-Confederate Army guerrillas whose life of crime ended with the famous Northfield, Minn., raid of 1876 in which Bob, Jim and Cole were captured. Affluent, intelligent sons of a respected Missouri family, the foursome were, in Brant's compassionate view, unable to distinguish between wartime and peacetime conduct. She pores over their family tree, and examines the Missouri-Kansas border war's effects on the Youngers. She also traces their involvement with the Frank and Jesse James gang and the lengthy incarcerations of charismatic Cole Younger, who received a pardon in 1903 and died in 1916, and his bookish, brilliant brother Jim, who was paroled in 1901 and committed suicide the following year. Brant's dedication notwithstanding, she proves unable to siftable to sift the significant from the trivial, so that the Younger brothers emerge from her biography as inscrutable as ever. Photos. (Oct.)