Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough
Burrough Is One Of The Best.
The astonishing true story of Americas first and greatest War on Crime. In
Public Enemies, Bryan Burrough strips away a thick layer of myths put out
by J. Edgar Hoovers FBI to tell the full story of the most spectacular crime
wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young Hoover
and an assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger,
Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy
Floyd, and the Barkers. In 1933, police jurisdictions ended at state lines,
the FBI was in its infancy, and fast cars and machine guns were easily
available. It was a great time to be a bank robber. On hand were a motley
crew of criminal masterminds, sociopaths, romantics, and cretins. Bryan
Burrough has unearthed an extraordinary amount of new material on all
the major figures involved -- revealing many fascinating interconnections in
the vast underworld ecosystem that stretched from Texas up to Minnesota.
But the real-life connections were insignificant next to the sense of
connectedness J. Edgar Hoover worked to create in the mind of the
American public-using the Great Crime Wave to gain the position of
untouchable power he would occupy for almost half a century.

Personal Review: Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough
This is one of the more interesting books I've read in recent months,
certainly among the non-fiction stuff I've read. I think my wife got bored as I
recounted one anecdote after another from these pages as I read them.
From Dillinger and his friends learning the craft of bank robbery from a
Prussian army officer turned bank robber, to the FBI agents capturing Alvin
Karpis, and then having to get directions to the Post Office (where Karpis
would be jailed) from Karpis himself because "We were thinking of robbing
it", there's one wonderful anecdote after another. The author is a very good
writer, uses descriptive phrases well and seems to understand people and
events of the period clearly. The result is an interesting book that I
endorse.
One fascinating thing about the book is the coincidental nature of the
events of the era. The author tells, in a author's note at the beginning of
the book, that the genesis of the book was when he discovered that all of
these characters---Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger,
Bonnie and Clyde, Alvin Karpis and the Barker Brothers, Machinegun
Kelly---committed their crimes essentially at the same time, during the
years 1933-4. All except Karpis were killed or captured during that period
too, and Karpis was caught the next year. So the author adopts an initially
interesting, and somewhat confusing writing style.
First he essentially ignores, except for short asides, the careers of the
criminals prior to the central period in the book. This is most evident with
Floyd, who'd been something of a Depression-era celebrity criminal for
several years before. Burrough only briefly mentions this. Each of the other
main outlaw characters of the story has his own map--Nelson, Dillinger, the
Barkers and Karpis, Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde--but Floyd doesn't get
that because for most of the book he was essentially in hiding, largely from
those crimes that happened before the book started. So Floyd isn't really
much of a character in the story.
The other thing the author does, which is interesting and works better, is
tell you what was happening to each of the criminals, pretty much
concurrently with one another. The book is arranged pretty strictly
chronologically, and the author pretty carefully keeps to this philosophy. So
what you get is sometimes rather choppy---Nelson robs a bank here, and
then the narrative jumps to Bonnie and Clyde, then to Dillinger, then to the
Barkers, and then back to Dillinger or Machinegun Kelly. The point that the
author was trying to make was that all of these events were happening
concurrently. While someone was pursuing Bonnie and Clyde, they might
be distracted by rumors that Pretty Boy Floyd or Baby Face Nelson was
nearby, and then get sidetracked trying to help someone find Kelly or the
Barkers. It *does* get pretty confusing at times, but that's part of the point:
it was confusing at the time, too, and when Thompson-toting bank robbers
(called "yeggs" at the time) shot up a town or a police car, it was often hard
to tell initially who the robbers were. The result is that by the middle of the

book, it's obvious that the pursuit of these individuals was a seriously
complicated enterprise.
That leads to the main theme of the book. As far as the author is
concerned, these few criminals made the FBI. The outcry at the inability of
local law enforcement to catch Dillinger especially, and also to catch the
criminals who engineered the "Kansas City Massacre" (when two police
detectives, and two FBI agents, were killed while transporting a criminal---
also killed---in Kansas City's train station parking lot), well the author
believes that pursuit led to the modern FBI. He lays out his case pretty
persuasively, and it's an interesting idea. On the one hand, these crimes
weren't significant in terms of national security, or a danger to society
overall in any way. They were dangerous, however, to local law
enforcement, in that these "yeggs" killed cops right and left, often because
they outnumbered and outgunned them, and were more experienced to
boot. How the FBI rose from a bureau mostly peopled by political
patronage appointments to the professional, button-down organization that
Hoover famously crafted, for better and for worse, is the main theme of the
book.
I really enjoyed this book. I don't think the author dramatized the events
much, and he doesn't worship the characters involved. He makes clear, for
instance, that Dillinger's claim he never killed anyone (echoed by Johnny
Depp on a late-night talk show recently) is just not true---Dillinger definitely
killed a policeman outside a bank in East Chicago, with a dozen witnesses
watching. He also doesn't glorify Purvis, making clear that for a good long
while his handling of the various manhunts was incompetent at best, and
often negligent.
In case you haven't guessed yet, this book gets my hearty endorsement.
This is one of the better books on a subject like this, and I really enjoyed it,
as I already said.
For More 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price:
Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price!