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
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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