Erudite, readable, and appalling.
A comprehensive recounting of a child murder and the resulting landmark trial.
On May 21, 1924, 19-year-old Nathan Leopold and 18-year-old Richard Loeb drove through the streets of Kenwood, an affluent, partially Jewish neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, looking for a random child to kill. They considered one of Richard’s little brother’s friends, but when that boy ran off, they settled on 14-year-old Bobby Franks, one of Richard’s cousins, with whom he’d played tennis the day before. Richard wished to prove himself a “master criminal”; Nathan wanted Richard to remain his lover. But despite the general incompetence and corruption of Chicago’s police force at that time, the pair were quickly taken into custody and confessed. Though their guilt was unquestionable, their families sought no less an attorney than Clarence Darrow (eminent in his profession though not yet of Scopes Monkey Trial fame), who took the case due to his hatred of the death penalty. Insanity had until then been seen as a binary condition; Darrow, saying “all life is worth saving,” argued that it was a continuum that could mitigate without fully denying culpability. Fleming, a master of meticulously researched nonfiction, covers Leopold’s and Loeb’s troubled childhoods, the horrible crime itself, the odd bond between the newspapers and the police that facilitated a conviction, and Darrow’s intelligence and humanity. In the end, however, Leopold and Loeb are so chilling that readers won’t celebrate their judicial victory.
Erudite, readable, and appalling. (afterword, bibliography, endnotes, photo credits) (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-17742-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Anne Schwartz/Random
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Unapologetic and unflinching: a critical read.
Through honest and powerful vignettes, Jewell’s latest stitches together a collective memoir of formative experiences of educational racism and American schooling by people of the global majority.
Anchored by the author’s narrative of navigating school as a “light-skinned Black biracial cis-female” in a working-class neighborhood of a city in New York state, the work incorporates both her experiences of being labeled and othered in school as well as the first-person experiences of people of various ages, ethnicities, races, and genders, who write about how they navigated and were affected by systemic racism in their K-12, college, and postgraduate educations. The contributors include well-known authors of young people’s literature including Joanna Ho, Minh Lê, and Randy Ribay; writers and educators such as Lorena and Roberto Germán, Torrey Maldonado, and Gayatri Sethi; and two entries by teens from Portland, Oregon. Alongside stories of segregation, mistreatment by white educators, hypervisibility, surveillance, stereotyping, pigeonholing, and exclusion, this collection asks readers to “envision what freedom in schools might be.” These bold tales of truth telling are interspersed with historical facts, definitions, and anti-racist pedagogy that emphasize and contextualize the reality that, while experiences of racism in educational systems evolve with each generation, one constant is that schools are microcosms of larger systems of inequality and institutional oppression in the world beyond classroom walls.
Unapologetic and unflinching: a critical read. (resources, recommended reading, references, about the contributors) (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780358638315
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Versify/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A remarkable biography.
The story of a flawed, complicated man.
The son of a distant Minnesota congressman and a demanding, well-educated mother, young Charles Lindbergh grew up shuttling among the family farm, his grandfather’s Detroit home, and Washington, D.C. Intelligent but uninterested in school, he began flying at age 19, getting involved in barnstorming and becoming an Air Service Reserve Corps officer. He used a combination of mechanical aptitude and moxie to successfully cross the Atlantic in a 1927 solo nonstop flight and was instantly propelled into worldwide celebrity. Success came at tremendous cost, however, when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered. Lindbergh was also his own enemy: His infatuation with eugenics led him into overt racism, open admiration for Hitler, and public denunciation of Jews. Fallen from grace, he nonetheless flew 50 clandestine combat missions in the South Pacific. He became an advocate for animal conservation but also had three secret families in addition to his acknowledged one. Fleming (Eleanor Roosevelt's in My Garage!, 2018, etc.) expertly sources and clearly details a comprehensive picture of a well-known, controversial man. Her frequent use of diaries allows much of the story to come through in Charles’ and his wife Anne’s own words. The man who emerges is hateable, pitiable, and admirable all at the same time, and this volume measures up to the best Lindbergh biographies for any audience.
A remarkable biography. (bibliography, source notes, picture credits, index) (Biography. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-64654-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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