Strawberries & Dillinger

I’ve finally finished it.  It only took me 4 months.  And no, it’s not a 2000-page book; I’m just a slow reader.  Thank you, Free Library, for allowing me to renew it 3 or 4 times.  (By the way, aren’t libraries great??  They let you borrow books for FREE!!  Now that hardbacks cost about $30 a pop, libraries are definitely the way to go.  They are green (hundreds os people can read the same copy of a book), promote community, responsibility and again, FREE!!  Awesome.  Okay, I didn’t mean to ramble on…)  

I’ve always been very interested in the outlaws of the 1920′s and 30′s (along with those of the proverbial “wild west.”)  I don’t know why that is.  Perhaps it is that most books and film tend to portray these “characters” in a very romantic, Robin Hood-esque sort of light.  In most cases, these characterizations are very far from the truth.  That is what I loved (and hated) about Bryan Burrough’s book.  The man did his research.  The information is very cut and dry; mostly facts with minimal speculation.  He has whittled out all the exaggerations and falsehoods created by previous authors on the subjects and by those who were involved first-hand (or claimed to be) and may have fudged a little in their telling of it.  In short, he has sucked the romance right out of it and left his readers with the cold, hard truth: that these people were mostly cold-blooded murderers and thieves.  

About two of the worst, Bonnie & Clyde, and the strange phenomenon of their elevation to heroic status, he writes this: “Art has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve.”  Very well put.  

One thing I really liked about this book is that, unlike books that are just about Bonnie and Clyde or just about Dillinger, this books gives you context.  Bonnie & Clyde, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, etc. were all kidnapping, robbing, murdering and running from the law at the same time, just as the FBI was discovering it’s own identity.  This covers everything.  The downside is that it’s easy to lose track of all the names, dates and events, with the narrative changing subjects from page to page.  At times, it was hard to follow.

The film, Public Enemies, starts tomorrow and I am very excited to see it.  Much of it was filmed in our area, including our Capitol Square and a place just up the road from us: Carandale, where we pick strawberries every June.  I just love picking strawberries.  There is something about a strawberry that is freshly picked and still warm from the sun.  It has a taste unlike anything you can buy at the local grocery store that has travelled and been refrigerated and seems far removed from the earth.  And it just so happens that this is the place where Michael Mann chose to film Pretty Boy Floyd’s death scene for Public Enemies.  Pretty cool, I’d say.

Advertisement