Yes, you guessed it! We WILL be adding this book to our discussion list for late February, we can discuss it as it's being filmed!

"Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34"
Bryan Burrough




http://www.amazon.com/Public-Enemies-Ameri...96918677&sr=8-1

woohoo Guess I'll learn all about Dillinger then! Glad we have another film to look forward to as well.

-Donna

Yup! We'll learn about Dillinger and the other "thugs" of the depression.

AND we will start the year, as planned with Mark Salisbury's companion book SWEENEY TODD in mid Jan.

Sweeney Todd is easy. I've already read that one! :)

Public Enemies ought to be an interesting read! :thumbsup

I'm looking forward to both.

You're all in for a treat. Burrough is an excellent writer and wonderful story teller. 'Nuff said until February.

Thanks for the info Leener!

I should be able to find this one on the library, no? Does anyone know how many pages?
(wondering how many times I'll have to renew it. :P )

Do we know if there is a difference between the ones published in 2004 and those in 2005. I have to get one shipped from the US, and the 2004 versions are a lot cheaper.

Anne x

I don't know that there's a difference...I know there is a hard back and a paper back.

Anne x,
Don't know the difference. I read the book copyrighted in 2004. That's the one in widest circulation. Good luck!

Arnelle, I just checked our library and there are 31 copies available in our system and none of them are checked out right now. (Make that 30 copies---I just requested one. ;) ) The catalogue description says there are 592 pages (2004 edition).
Hope that helps a bit...
Rose

Amp,
It's about 500 pages in the paperback edition. Personally, I found it a quick read especially for non-fiction.

I called several of the areas' libraries around here and it's pretty much available everywhere.

Oh, goody! :snoopy Thanks guys. I will get to it as soon as I'm done drooling on my ST book. Wait: edit that to say I'll never be done drooling on that, but I'll get to the Feb discussion book about 2 weeks before. I've learned it's good to have the book in your possession during a discussion.

Oh, fantastic. I got my copy this week and already started reading it.. I know a lot of these places... oooh. This is going to be fun!! woohoo

The pic of Earl Connelly (pg 3 of the center photos) sorta looks like that Actor guy who played Sweeney Todd...LOL.

But John Dillinger smirked on the left side while our Johnny smirks on the right ... LOL :snoopy

Feb you say? I'll be waiting...

Holly

BTW I only paid $6 for a used copy thru Amazon.

Gotta love Amazon....yes, later in Feb!

Oh good, still waiting for mine to come.

Yes I've heard from many people who are still waiting for their book to arrive and it's also over 600 pages long...the first part of March may be more like the actual start date.

When I looked for it at Border's, I was told it was no longer in print, so they ordered a used copy from Amazon for me. It's been a few weeks, so I hope it gets here this week some time.

I got my copy in the mail today! woohoo woohoo

That is what I did Holly. I went to Amazon Marketplace and got mine (in excellent condition) for less than $6.00. I'm learning alot from this book. Very interesting!!

Nicci :angel

I think it's a fascinating book, and there is so much to digest as you read it. It's not a fast read at all. But it is amazing!

Thanks for reminding me! YIKES!
I have an ERROR message on my library card...
off to the library AND bookstore! :snoopy

I can't believe it's out of print! If the publishers are one bit savvy they'll get on the ball and get it back in publication pronto. I got my copy used as well, after first getting a copy at the library and realizing I couldn't possibly handle the heft of it, let alone a discussion, without having my very own copy to mutilate! I love this story, and this era, and the whole idea of Johnny playing Dillinger. What a great, fortuitous adventure for us all!

Thanks to this book I found out that Clyde (Bonnie and Clyde fame) was once arrested in the town I live in here in Ohio. I have been told the story of the day Dillenger was here and actually ate at a diner that is still in business. My dad was in the movie theatre across the street and they wouldn't let people leave the theatre until Dillenger was gone. I think that this town still looks the same. See, they could have come here to film. :rolleyes: This town wouldn't know what to do if someone of Johnny's calibur showed up here to do a movie.

Nicci :angel

Knowing that Deppfan, it gives me chills. I ordered this book through Amazon and its on the way. I should get it late next week. I wouldn't know what to do if Johnny was filming somewhere around here..I know with my luck I wouldn't get a glimse. That would be very sad, you know?

WOW! Nicci, that's fascinating. What a chilling but wonderful story.

I haven't started reading this book yet, but will pretty soon. I have to finish my book on 'The Dam Busters' first.

Wow! I had no idea Dillinger posed such a threat when he came to town that ordinary people couldn't even watch him eat!!
That's amazing!

I guess that they just warned people because they had no idea what he might have on his mind. Thing of it was he had just escaped from prison in Lima, OH and was on his way to Hamilton, OH (our county seat) and the stupid police here were so scared that they didn't go near the diner and then they just watched him leave town. According to what my father told my mother the police were criticized for all of this.

Nicci :angel

I just received my book from Amazon. I can't wait to read it and more excited to see our guy in the movie. They haven't even started filming and I'm getting antsy. Go for the Gold again, Johnny!!!

Just received my copy, too!! woohoo

I'm still working my way through the book and I'm right in the thick of Dillinger parts right now. Are others picturing Johnny whenthey read the book? I can just see him in this role and I'm getting more excited about it. Just wish it would come out in 2008 so we won't be Johnnyless filmwise this year.........

-Donna

I found this on borders.com~
I found the descriptions of Bonnie and Clyde, "Baby Face" Nelson and Ma Barker very interesting.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
This fascinating book tells, in detail, the events of the War on Crime waged in the years 1933 and '34. A rich and colorful cast of characters parades through the pages. On the bad guy side, we find Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Alvin Karpis and the Barker family. On the side of law and order, there was J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI along with local police and other officials. The battle unfolded amid an amazing epidemic of bank robberies, part of what some people saw as a great crime wave. More than anything else, it was probably the Kansas City Massacre -- a bloody incident in June 1933, which left a pile of dead detectives and law enforcement officers -- that touched off the war. This massacre shocked the country -- and the FBI -- into action.
Crime had gone interstate, which was a new problem for the forces of law and order. The automobile gave mobility and speed to gangs of bank robbers; the machine gun gave them firepower. During the Great Depression, poverty and social disorganization were eating away at the country's social fabric. Corruption corroded the heart of local law enforcement. The FBI, a relatively new organization, was weak, untrained and uncertain. Its men were, in many ways, staggeringly incompetent. But the FBI, over the course of two tumultuous years, gradually learned how to become a sleeker, more efficient instrument. Despite its bumbling and a host of false starts, by the end of the period the FBI had won the war and the "public enemies" had lost. Bonnie and Clyde died in a hail of bullets. Dillinger was cut down outside the Biograph theater in Chicago. Kelly and Nelson were also dead. So were the Barkers. Alvin Karpis was on his way to Alcatraz.

But the good guys endured a comedy of errors before all that happened. Burrough's account is peppered with tales of missed opportunities, bad detective work, poor record-keeping and all-around sloppiness. Desperate to catch John Dillinger, in March 1934 the FBI "stormed the Chicago apartment of a woman named Anne Baker," who was supposed to have harbored Dillinger following his escape from an Indiana jail earlier that month. The raid was a "debacle." In fact, the FBI had "raided the wrong address." Even worse was the raid on "Little Bohemia," where Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson were supposed to be holed up. That raid was a fiasco. All of the criminals escaped, and the FBI ended up shooting a completely innocent man.

The public enemies were hardly geniuses, either. They, too, had their share of ludicrous errors. For example, the Karpis-Barker gang seized a hand truck, "stacked with bulging sacks" and heavily guarded, outside the Federal Reserve Building in Chicago. The gang got away -- only to discover they had stolen not money but bags of mail. In contrast, knocking off a bank appeared to be child's play. The "public enemies" raced about the country, stealing wads of cash from banks, renting apartments, buying cars, picking up women and having a good time between jobs. They were protected by a network of supporters and hangers-on (and sometimes corrupt officials). Their insatiable greed -- and their inability to stop robbing and killing -- led to their destruction,

It is a wild and amazing story, and Burrough tells it with great gusto. Truth is often not only stranger than fiction but also a lot more interesting. Burrough's research is careful and extraordinarily thorough. He debunks many of the tall tales that have accrued around these almost mythical figures. The famous woman in a red dress who betrayed John Dillinger was actually wearing an orange skirt. Machine Gun Kelly was "inept" and "never a menacing figure." Bonnie and Clyde were totally unlike the characters in the famous movie; they were "lazy drifters who murdered nearly a dozen innocent men." Most striking, perhaps, was the case of Ma Barker, grandmother and head of a family of violent crooks. That was the image. In reality, Ma Barker was a rather stupid old woman who liked to work jigsaw puzzles and had never been mastermind of anything, including crime. When she ended up with a bullet through her head, the FBI had some explaining to do. Hoover then concocted the tale of Ma Barker the master criminal, the "brains" of the gang, an evil genius who died with a machine gun in her hands, "spidery, crafty Ma Barker," whose "withered fingers" controlled the fate of her family of "desperadoes." Not a word of this was true.

In a narrow sense, the War on Crime was a great success. Hoover got what he wanted; the public enemies were put out of business. And in the process he created the modern FBI. He also advocated a bigger role for the federal government in the battle against criminal elements and established a strong federal agency to carry on that war.

Still, Hoover's legacy was a dubious one. His agency improved its skill while gaining a great deal of power that it often abused. Those abuses took various forms, such as "vigorous physical interviews" that we might call gross brutality. As the power of the FBI and its director became "absolute," the agency, according to Burrough, was itself "corrupted absolutely." The Bureau still "wrestles with" its mixed record to this day. As for the public enemies, they were really only bit-players in the drama of high crime. As Burrough points out, law enforcement launched no "broader drives on the Chicago Syndicate or Italian Mafias, no war on counterfeiting or other crimes." Nor was there any attack on the rot and corruption of the cities, on the crooked sheriffs and police lieutenants and the vast interconnections between the agencies of organized crime. Dillinger, the Barkers and the others were, in fact, disorganized crime. They robbed and they killed, but they did not, in the main, threaten the fabric of society, the texture of local and state government or the integrity of law enforcement.

Public Enemies is a significant book, and a very readable one. It is easy to toss around terms like "definitive," but this book deserves it. It is hard to imagine a more careful, complete and entrancing book on this subject, and on this era. Readers will not be disappointed.


Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

*posted for entertainment only no copyright infringement is intended*

I ordered mine from B & B yesterday, I am so EXCITED to get it!!
woohoo

I just finished the book this weekend - plenty of time to read being home sick with the flu... :(

I totally pictured Johnny while I was reading the Dillinger parts. I can see why he wants to do this role - he'll be perfect. In fact, if Dillinger had been a pirate, I think he would be very much like Captain Jack Sparrow! :captainjack I am so looking forward to this movie. :snoopy

Glad to hear that you enjoyed the book and are feeling better! :snoopy

Hope you are feeling much better soon. Like you I can picture Johnny as the perfect person for this part. I don't think that any other actor could portray Dillinger as well. Plus I think that Johnny will have fun with this one.

Nicci :angel

I am still reading this interesting book. I'm about half way. My son, Shaun was wondering if this movie is going to be rated R. He is only 7 right now, he'll be 8 this July. I think he wants to see it. I told him I didn't know how far they intend to go with it, gore wise. Does anyone have a clue? Karen? I was wondering that too. In the book how they tell how someone gets shot, some of it sounds kind of gross. I am enjoying this book too. I can't wait to see it.

I don't have a clue what the rating will come in at. It depends on the violence and language. Guess it's a wait and see kinda thing! ;)