Burrough (a special correspondent for Vanity Fair) examines the stories of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker-Karpis Gang, Machine Gun Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde as a single narrative history of the FBI's "War on Crime" from 1933 to 1936. His examination of the recently release FBI files reveals a story vastly different from the largely mythical narrative promoted by J. Edgar Hoover or the romantic portrayals of the gangs by Hollywood. For Burrough, the story is about the bureaucratic evolution of the FBI from a bungling group of amateurs to a professional crime-fighting organization and his central aim is to reclaim the history for the individual agents involved. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

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. (July 22) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Burrough (coauthor, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco) is clearly a gifted writer and a skilled researcher. Yet while many of the vignettes in this portrait of a crime era read like the best fiction, the book suffers from considerable back and forth and ends up a disappointing, disjointed affair. Just when the reader starts turning pages faster as the FBI begins to move in on Baby Face Nelson, Burrough switches to the hunt for John Dillinger. However colorful, the various gang members become harder and harder to distinguish, and the uninitiated will find themselves confused by the seemingly bland recitation of FBI agents complete with birth date, service dates, etc. and the criminals they pursued. With so much material, including recently released FBI files, Burrough could easily have filled twice the pages. In fact, he intends this to be serious history and rails against the Hollywood treatment afforded these murderous criminals, yet he, too, is guilty of sensational writing. Of interest mainly to true fans. Karen Sandlin Silverman, CFAR-Ctr. for Applied Research, Philadelphia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

The title Public Enemies captures the focus of this history of the early 1930s "war on crime." Former journalist and popular writer Burrough graphically recounts the FBI's role in countering the nation's notorious gangsters of the 1930s (John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, the Barker gang, Alvin Karpis, George Kelly, and Charles Floyd). Through research in relevant FBI records, contemporary news stories, and interviews, Burrough clarifies and at times rebuts the myths about these colorful gangsters and the FBI's responses. His narrow if detailed and engrossing focus on the gangster-FBI conflict will undoubtedly command the interest of crime buffs. But this very focus, combined with his failure to research Justice Department, Roosevelt administration, and congressional records, and FBI files on prominent journalists Courtney Ryley Cooper, Henry Suydam, and Walter Trohan, reduces the value of this history for criminologists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians. Burrough adds little to our understanding of the FBI's emergence as a powerful and revered agency--shaped less by the FBI's planning and violent response to independent gangsters than by the politics of internal security of the late 1930s, WW II, and Cold War eras. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Public libraries and general collections only. A. Theoharis Marquette University From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Bryan Burrough was born in 1961 in Temple, Texas. Burrough is a New York Times best-selling author, special correspondent at Vanity Fair, and former Wall Street Journal reporter. Burrough graduated from the University of Missouri's School of Journalism in 1983. While in college, he was a reporter for the Columbia Missourian and interned at the Waco Tribune-Herald and the Wall Street Journal's Dallas Bureau.

Burrough's bestselling book, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34, is scheduled to be released as a movie in 2009.

Burrough is a three-time winner of the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for Excellence in Financial Journalism. He lives in Summit, New Jersey with his wife and their two sons. <30> Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Author's Note	p. xi
Cast of Characters	p. xv
Prologue	p. 1
1 A Prelude to War, Spring 1933	p. 5
2 A Massacre by Persons Unknown, June 8 to June 15, 1933	p. 19
3 The College Boys Take the Field, June 17 to July 22, 1933	p. 51
4 The Baying of the Hounds, July 22 to August 25, 1933	p. 71
5 The Kid Jimmy, August 18 to September 25, 1933	p. 98
6 The Streets of Chicago, October 12 to November 20, 1933	p. 135
7 Ambushes, November 20 to December 31, 1933	p. 162
8 "An Attack on All We Hold Dear," January 2 to January 28, 1934	p. 183
9 A Star Is Born, January 30 to March 2, 1934	p. 206
10 Dillinger and Nelson, March 3 to March 29, 1934	p. 234
11 Crescendo, March 30 to April 10, 1934	p. 267
12 Death in the North Woods, April 10 to April 23, 1934	p. 292
13 "And It's Death for Bonnie and Clyde," April 23 to May 23, 1934	p. 323
14 New Faces, May 24 to June 30, 1934	p. 362
15 The Woman in Orange, July 1 to July 27, 1934	p. 388
16 The Scramble, July 23 to September 12, 1934	p. 417
17 A Field in Ohio and a Highway in Illinois, September 18 to November 27, 1934	p. 446
18 The Last Man Standing, December 3, 1934, to January 20, 1935	p. 484
19 Pas de Deux, January 1935 Until...	p. 515
Epilogue	p. 543
Bibliographical Essay	p. 553
Notes	p. 556
Selected Bibliography	p. 567
Acknowledgments	p. 571
Index	p. 573

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