Customer Reviews

On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover’s America

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I sat down to read a page or two and could not put the book down...On the Lam opens with the account of Robert Burns--a man sent to the chain gang for armed robbery of roughly ...--and his escape to Chicago where he founded a successful press. His landlady falls in love with him, finds out he's wanted in Georgia and blackmails him. When the Georgia officials find him in Illinois, they persuade him to return to finish his 10-year term in a matter of months. Once he returns, it's evident they plan to force him to serve the whole term. So he escapes *again* and makes a living selling his stories to detective magazines while on the lam. His novel is made into an academy award winning movie (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) starring Paul Muni; the movie exposed the cruelties on a chain gang and the resulting public outcry created drastic improvements of the system. And so begins this book's focus on a subject that has captivated America for years--the fugitive.

Beverly's discussion of the deadly and dangerous contest between Hoover's FBI and the Midwestern bandit John Dillinger is one of my favorite parts of the book.

Beverly brings a novelist's sensibility to literary and cultural criticism. An incisive, engaging read, and a timely one: in a day when fugitives from American-style justice capture the headlines, Beverly observes the importance of the fugitive figure to American culture at the dawn of the modern.