For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago | Simon Baatz

For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago | Simon Baatz | Interesting work but a tad clinical

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For the Thrill of ...

	For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago Simon Baatz Harper, 2008 - 560 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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It was a crime that shocked the nation, a brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child, by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had first met several years earlier, and their friendship had blossomed into a love affair. Both were intellectuals?too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. However, the police had recovered an important clue at the scene of the crime?a pair of eyeglasses?and soon both Leopold and Loeb were in the custody of Cook County. They confessed, and Robert Crowe, the state's attorney, announced to newspaper reporters that he had a hanging case. No defense, he believed, would save the two ruthless killers from the gallows.

Set against the backdrop of the 1920s, a time of prosperity, self-indulgence, and hedonistic excess, For the Thrill of It draws the reader into a lost world, a world of speakeasies and flappers, of gangsters and gin parties, that existed when Chicago was a lawless city on the brink of anarchy. The rejection of morality, the worship of youth, and the obsession with sex had seemingly found their expression in this callous murder.

But the murder is only half the story. After Leopold and Loeb were arrested, their families hired Clarence Darrow to defend their sons. Darrow, the most famous lawyer in America, aimed to save Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty by showing that the crime was the inevitable consequence of sexual and psychological abuse that each defendant had suffered during childhood at the hands of adults. Both boys, Darrow claimed, had experienced a compulsion to kill, and therefore, he appealed to the judge, they should be spared capital punishment. However, Darrow faced a worthy adversary in his prosecuting attorney: Robert Crowe was clever, cunning, and charismatic, with ambitions of becoming Chicago's next mayor?and he was determined to send Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to their deaths.

A masterful storyteller, Simon Baatz has written a gripping account of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case. Using court records and recently discovered transcripts, Baatz shows how the pathological relationship between Leopold and Loeb inexorably led to their crime.

This thrilling narrative of murder and mystery in the Jazz Age will keep the reader in a continual state of suspense as the story twists and turns its way to an unexpected conclusion.

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The Legend of Leopold and Loeb Comes To Life!

Despite the fact that Bobby Franks's grizzly murder took place in 1924, the subsequent trial of Leopold and Loeb has never let go of our collective imaginations. When one reads For the Thrill of It, one can easily understand why. The murder of Bobby Franks by wealthy teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb touces on many issues that are still fervently talked about today: the limits of 'insanity' as a mitigating factor in sentencing, the morality of the death penalty, whether individuals are capable of free choice or victims of biological and environmental factors.

For those unfamiliar, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were wealthy and well-educated teenagers, both with very bizarre childhoods, who developed a bizarre and dependent friendhip (and love affair). These two anti-social teenagers decided that it might be fun to kidnap, torture, and kill - they debated on whether rape should be added - a schoolboy selected at random. Their desire was to create the perfect crime. (See for yourself whether Nathan Leopol is not one of the most chilling and perplexing characters you have ever read about!)

At this, hey failed. The bloodied body was found within 48 hours, and the boys' additional plan to extort ransom from the boy's father failed as well. What ensued was a wildly controversial trial that captured national attention, as legendary defense attorney Clarance Darrow attempted to avoid the death penalty for the two obviously guilty boys. The argument: the two boys were victims not only of their bizarre childhoods, but biological peculiarities (this was the age of endocrinology).

This book is a fascinating recount of the murder, the trial, and the aftermath. Baatz writing is captivating and the book reads like fiction. Baatz is as entertaining as he is thorough. We are not only treated to a thoughtful recount of the lives of Leopold, Loeb, and many other involved characters, but also of the state of the 1920s criminal justice system and the burgeoning field of psychiatry. Through all of this, we find out just how revolutionary the goings on of the trial of Leopold and Loeb were; it would not be an overstatement to say that many American ideas - views on the death penalty, human choice, and the nature of insanity - were challenged if not turned on their heads.

It is also a testament to Simon Baatz's acumen that this almost-600-page book never once seemed too long. All of the information given was necessary to the book's relentless forward motion. In the end, For the Thrill of It reads like a first rate murder mystery that allows its readers to learn quite a bit along the way.

This has been one of my favorite reads of the year.

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Interesting work but a tad clinical

All in all I liked this book. I thought the writer did a good job of setting the scene and providing the background for the crime and probably did the best job of describing the mental state and lack of humanity for Leopold and Loeb. Where he fell apart was in trying to make the story of a dry legal drama the heart of the story.

The drama in this case certainly took place in the court room, but rather then make it a battle between some of the great legal minds of the day, we are treated to a battle between different experts some of whom help the state, some the defense. It is quite difficult to decide who is winning and then boom, we are told what to think by the author.

All in all it is an interesting story of one of the first great media trials, but it is certainly not a great piece of work.

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Those Crazy Kids

If all you know about Leopold and Loeb is what you learned from the movie Swoon, prepare to be underwhelmed. The real life boys weren't nearly so avant-garde or attractive or even interesting. They're aren't even as interesting as their renamed versions in the movie Compulsion. The sad fact is that the most interesting thing about these two was the senseless murder they committed. Doctors, lawyers, reporters and writers have been trying ever since to make some sense of the murder - all with limited results.

Simon Baatz takes a very different approach. He doesn't try to explain WHY anything happened but he does go into great detail about WHAT happened. He tells the story in an "as it happened" way, complete with the thoughts of the participants, almost reminiscent of Capote's In Cold Blood. Which is not to say that Baatz achieves the heights or the insights Capote did. And how could he? Capote spoke to the murderers, Leopold and Loeb are long dead.

This is a risky narrative choice and combined with Baatz's tendency to cut away from the main story to detail (and I do mean detail) another case with direct bearing on or implications for L&L's case it's not always a success. Either we're "in the moment" or we're not, it's hard to have it both ways. It's even harder when those segues are tangents about the prosecutor's career or Clarence Darrow's defense of the LA Times bombers. (After half a dozen of these "shocking" Chicago murders you have to wonder what exactly was in the water in Chicago back then.) Baatz does draw on a mountain of available documentation to recreate L&L's interrogation and trials, even their crime itself and often does create a sense of immediacy.

I'm still hard pressed to give this book anything better than 3 stars. Baatz's prose is decent, his research seems impeccable but ... it just doesn't add up to much. I feel well-informed now on what happened in the case (and I knew just the bare outlines before) but the nagging sense of why or what it means is more acute. Aside from the fact that Nathan "Babe" Leopold and Richard Loeb were complete jerks and that Richard Loeb wasn't the "genius" he was purported to be, I'm not sure that being better informed has helped me to draw any conclusions about the case on my own. It remains not so much enigmatic as pointless.

If you're very interested in the Leopold and Loeb case but don't know the details or if you have an interest in the evolution of insanity defenses, this book might be of interest to you. (Not having read any other books on the case I can't offer a comparison.) If you're a fan of popular history or true crime this might be of interest if you're already interested in the era, otherwise this is probably too specialized for general interest. Either way, take advantage of Amazon's preview option before purchasing - the narrative method didn't bother me but it might be annoying for some readers.

Kindle note: there's evidence here of yet another crime, that of a publisher failing to edit the ebook version. Nearly all the hyphens from the printed text are absent from the Kindle version along with many commas and semicolons. You get used to it after awhile but it certainly doesn't help to get bogged down by an apparent run-on-sentence when the narrative is supposed to convey a sense of immediacy.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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