Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (ISBN:9780143115861)

Trade Paperback. 8vo - over 7æ" - 9æ" tall. xxv+592 pp. 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. parallels between the bureau's "reinvention" in the 1930s and war on terror . some pencil underlinings and ears ow very good.