Word: burroughs
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...nonfiction book by Bryan Burrough that inspired the movie is a panorama of G-men and gunmen: Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, the whole colorful rogues' gallery. The movie concentrates on Dillinger, known as Public Enemy No. 1, so the plural in the title suggests that not just he but also Hoover was a national menace. Dillinger is seen as an independent businessman being squeezed by two ruthless cartels: Frank Nitti's gang and Hoover's FBI - the Chicago Mob and the wrong...
...page-turning tale with well developed characters that seems boxed up and ready for the silver screen. It's impossible to read this book and not think of the 2007 film There Will Be Blood, which put the ruthless business of land rights and oil drilling into sharp focus. Burrough's tome, though, is broader and explores not just the greed, wealth and risk of early twentieth century American oil prospecting, but also what it meant for the rest of the country beyond Texas. Lyndon Johnson, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George W. Bush are just three of the politicians...
...challenge Burrough faces in writing about people like Nelson and Kelly is that they've gone thin and stiff with age. "After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture," Burrough writes, "their stories have been bled of all reality." Burrough strips the comic-book glamour off those cardboard villains and gives them back their grit and power to shock. We learn that Nelson was a tiny blond sociopath whose viciousness frightened even his pals. "Pretty Boy" Floyd--Charley to his friends--was a Dust Bowl farm boy. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow come off as greedy, murderous children...
They weren't quite, but five of them were, including Nash. According to Bryan Burrough's massively researched, ludicrously entertaining Public Enemies (Penguin Press; 592 pages), the Kansas City Massacre, as it came to be called, jump-started a national anticrime campaign that turned a governmental backwater called the Bureau of Investigations (the Federal came later) into the modern FBI. The killings also inaugurated a rollicking two-year carnival of bank robberies and kidnappings carried out by men like "Baby Face" Nelson and "Machine Gun" Kelly, men whose nicknames ring a bell but who, it turns out, we never really...
Dillinger is the only one whose tremendous charisma survives Burrough's research intact. Smart, good-natured and media savvy, he had a genius for improvisational humor. When a cop walked into a bank mid-robbery, Dillinger greeted him with a hearty "Come right in and join us!" He was also as tough as nails. In one harrowing scene, he undergoes amateur plastic surgery to alter his appearance (tragically, they filled in his dashing cleft chin). As for his colleagues--alas, the truth about "Pretty Boy" Floyd isn't pretty at all. But it's a whole...