Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
by Bryan Burrough
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bryan BurroughEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-04-29
ISBN: 0143115863
Number of pages: 624
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
Book Review: Criminally Captivating
Summary: 5 Stars
It's a tired cliché to say the book's better than the movie, but here it's far truer than usual.
Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" was one of our best director's worst movies. On paper, it looked like a great combination; he likes cops and criminals, and his criminals tend to be too cool for neckties, as was Dillinger. But the movie unexpectedly fell victim to his strange obsession with shooting things on digital video. Perhaps his intent was to give it a gritty you-are-there feel, but while that works with some film techniques and some historical eras, this combination simply failed, and it ended up looking like a cheesy History Channel documentary. (The all-important illusion, whereby a great movie can make you forget you're watching a movie, failed; a little part of my brain kept saying, "Hey, they didn't have digital video in the 30s!" I never for a moment felt like I was watching John Dillinger, but remained conscious instead of the fact that I was watching Michael Mann shooting Johnny Depp playing Dillinger. The only things I liked were that a close personal friend had a prominent role as an extra, and that they shot on location in Chicago and dressed up the place where Dillinger was shot in 1930s facades, so I had the chance to go there and set my camera on sepia and take pictures of myself with the Biograph Theater in the background and tell people I'd been on a time-travel vacation. I digress.)
ANYWAY, yet another failing of the movie--and to be fair to Mr. Mann, one that may have been unavoidable unless he'd stretched this into a miniseries--was that it only paid attention to the relatively well-known story of Dillinger's life and death, ignoring the other gripping stories that were simultaneously captivating a Depression-weary nation and turning a once-insignificant branch of the Justice Department into a powerful national police force. For Brian Burrough's book gives us not just Dillinger, but four other narratives--Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers.
Only the first of those is well-remembered these days, and that only as a Hollywood-ized glamorization of a couple whose story, not very well known before the Warren Beatty film, provided a nearly blank canvas for some ambitious screenwriters to paint an early-30s story in late-60s colors. But all five of these threads tied together over the course of a remarkable two-year period in the 1930s, collectively leading to the federalization of American law enforcement. Indeed, Dillinger et. al. did for this sphere of life what the Federal Reserve did for banking and the Civil Rights era did for race relations--take an area of public policy out of the hands of possibly crooked local authorities and place it in the hands of possibly incompetent national ones. Arguably this was as necessary in this sphere as it was in the others; certainly motorized travel had revolutionized the ability of criminals to commit a crime in one jurisdiction and flee to another--or across the country, for that matter--before anyone knew what had happened. Still, with J. Edgar Hoover placing a premium on smarts, neatness, and obedience and neglecting, you know, actual law enforcement skills, the agents under his purview missed many opportunities and made many catastrophic mistakes before these criminals were brought to bay. (A prime culprit is Melvin Purvis, the G-Man who, as legend has it, successfully led the Dillinger pursuit--and who in reality missed many prime opportunities to capture Dillinger before being quietly relieved of his leadership position prior to Dillinger's demise.)
Burrough spends just enough time looking at the big picture to render some perspective; he places far more of an emphasis on the nitty gritty, the detailed minutiae of the cases in question. This gives the book heft, and like any heavy object, there's a certain amount of inertia to it; the beginning chapters are so full of introductions and lead-ins to a variety of complicated cases and personalities that it makes for slow reading. (Also, he's too honest a writer and reporter to pretend he knows the truth in those cases where there's conflicting credible evidence.) But his honesty, diligence and hard work in turn sets up some great set pieces once the book gets moving; the chapter on the bloody and disastrous raid on Dillinger's temporary hideout at the Little Bohemia cabins in Northern Wisconsin makes for an incredibly taut read, and the chapter which wraps up the stories of Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson is one of the most gripping pieces of nonfiction I've ever read; indeed, I plowed through the last 150 pages of the book in a single day.
As gripping as this book is in the end, though, perhaps its most important virtue is the slower parts, for these make it a definitive narrative of J. Edgar Hoover's War on Crime. Unlike the public enemies in question--and the lawmen who used their stories to gain power and prestige, and the mythmakers who sold redacted versions of those stories to the public--"Public Enemies" doesn't hold us hostage and feed us a limited set of facts. Burrough puts everything out there, the romantic and the sordid, the heroic and the ugly. His intent, it seems, isn't to undermine this breathless and compelling narrative, but to flesh it out properly, to tell it without sacrificing its factual integrity--in short, to get as close as possible to the unknowable truth. The truth shall set you free, it is said--and fortunately it makes for a great book, too.
More Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 reviews:
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Summary of Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34
Coming in Summer 2009, the major motion picture from Universal Studios
"ludicrously entertaining" (Time), Public Enemies is the story of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, 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 an epic feat of storytelling, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover's G-men secured the FBI's rise to power.
"ludicrously entertaining" (Time), Public Enemies is the story of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, 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 an epic feat of storytelling, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover's G-men secured the FBI's rise to power.
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