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Title details for Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough - Available

Public Enemies

by Bryan Burrough
Campbell Scott
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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The astonishing true story of America's first and greatest "War on Crime."
In Public Enemies, Bryan Burrough strips away a thick layer of myths put out by J. Edgar Hoover's 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 1, 2004

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780743539913
      • File size: 177175 KB
      • Duration: 06:09:06

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Campbell Scott's careful reading effectively documents the fledgling FBI's handling of the 1933-34 crime wave, which brought great public recognition to the organization and established J. Edgar Hoover as the nation's #1 law enforcer, a position he maintained for over forty years. Many of the criminals Burrough portrays--Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd--became household names. Their deeds, while occasionally comic, were mostly cruel, bloody, and deadly. The bitter reality of the Depression era is movingly depicted as both Hoover and the mythic character of the FBI he created are soundly debunked. L.C. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 28, 2004
      Burrough, an award-winning financial journalist and Vanity Fair
      special correspondent, best known for Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
      , switches gears to produce the definitive account of the 1930s crime wave that brought notorious criminals like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde to America's front pages. Burrough's fascination with his subject matter stems from a family connection—his paternal grandfather manned a roadblock in Arkansas during the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde—and he successfully translates years of dogged research, which included thorough review of recently disclosed FBI files, into a graceful narrative. This true crime history appropriately balances violent shootouts and schemes for daring prison breaks with a detailed account of how the slew of robberies and headlines helped an ambitious federal bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover transform a small agency into the FBI we know today. While some of the details (e.g., that Dillinger got a traffic ticket) are trivial, this book compellingly brings back to life people and times distorted in the popular imagination by hagiographic bureau memoirs and Hollywood. Burrough's recent New York Times
      op-ed piece drawing parallels between the bureau's "reinvention" in the 1930s and today's reform efforts to combat the war on terror will help attract readers looking for lessons from history. Agent, Andrew Wylie
      . 6-city author tour.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      You know something's wrong at the FBI when J. Edgar Hoover is answering the phones. Bryan Burrough's PUBLIC ENEMIES contains 27 hours of remarkable facts about the bumbling origins of the FBI. In one instance, Hoover had to come up with a reason why his G-men killed Ma Barker, so he made up a tale that she was the brains of the gang and died with a machine gun in her hands. Burrough has equally revealing details about gangsters--for example, they stayed away from Southern banks because they were afraid of Southern prisons. Narrator Richard M. Davidson adds a swaggering James Cagney-like reading to this addictive story about a bygone period in U.S. history when "yegg men" used automobiles and state boundaries to become ruthless folk heroes. R.W.S. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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