by Simon Baatz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2008
A solid true-crime thriller that’s also a masterly analysis of postwar shifts in society’s ideas about crime and personality.
Baatz (History/John Jay Coll.) reviews the notorious 1924 murder case and its ramifications in law, psychiatry and the media.
University of Chicago graduate students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, both from prominent Chicago families, fed off each other’s fantasies and dreamed of committing the perfect crime for the “pure love of excitement.” On May 21, 1924, they rented a car and drove to Leopold’s alma mater, the Harvard School on Ellis Avenue, where they picked up Loeb’s 14-year-old cousin, Bobby Franks. They bludgeoned and suffocated him, then ditched the body before typing out a ransom note for his parents. The boy’s body was discovered before the ransom could be paid, however, and within ten days his killers were in custody, and Cook County state’s attorney Robert Crowe had elicited their confessions. If Crowe was to win a hanging verdict for Leopold and Loeb, still in their teens, he had to convince a jury that the murder was a rational act for which they were legally accountable. But Clarence Darrow, Loeb’s attorney and leader of the defense team, cleverly engineered the reversal of both pleas from not guilty to guilty. This paved the way for saving the defendants’ lives by avoiding a trial by jury, throwing them on the mercy of the judge and pleading for a lesser sentence because of their youth. Baatz lucidly lays out the complicated courtroom maneuvers and also provides a fascinating, skillful analysis of two different legal philosophies. “The first great cause of crime is poverty,” averred humanitarian Darrow, though the Leopold-Loeb murder belied this belief.
A solid true-crime thriller that’s also a masterly analysis of postwar shifts in society’s ideas about crime and personality.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-078100-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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by Simon Baatz
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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