36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Failed ubermenschen, August 9, 2008
How to understand Leopold and Loeb, the two young men who live on in national memory as the poor rich kids who murdered a youngster in 1924 to see if they could pull off the perfect crime? Motivated on the surface by a Nietzsche-inspired urge to go beyond conventional standards of good and evil, the crime actually seems to have been drawn from much murkier waters: sexual passion, feelings of inadequacy and rage, cultural ennui. Like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, what Loeb and Leopold claimed as their motive was only the tip of the iceberg.
Simon Baatz's For the Thrill of It explores the underbelly of Leopold and Loeb by focusing heavily on the psychiatric testimony of three expert witnesses marshalled by defense attorney Clarence Darrow. These three witnesses--William White, William Healy, and Bernard Glueck--shared Darrow's view that most of criminal law was really a subset of psychology: criminals are suffering from mental disorders and need to be treated rather than punished. Despite this conviction, Darrow entered a plea of guilty for his two clients, fearing that if he copped an insanity plea and took the case to a jury, he would lose. So his strategy instead was to plead guilty and try to lessen the sentence by convincing the presiding judge that Leopold and Loeb were crazy as bedbugs.
It didn't work. The two were sentenced to 99 years. Loeb was killed in prison 12 years later; Leopold was eventually paroled and died in Puerto Rico.
Baatz's book is both an intriguing history of one of the most notorious American crimes of the twentieth century, but also an interesting reflection on the insanity plea in criminal cases, told through the intense courtroom battle between Darrow and Prosecuting Attorney Richard Crowe But in all honesty, at times I found myself flipping pages. The book is perhaps 100 pages longer than it need be, and Baatz's invention of scenes and dialogue and internal monologues for the key players in a book that purports to be history is (for me, at least) disconcerting. The story is dramatic enough without Baatz's "literary" interpolations.
Still, well worth reading. Leopold and Loeb remain intensely interesting characters. One can understand, to some extent, the psychology behind In Cold Blood murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. They were social outcasts, "losers" seething with anger at the cards dealt them by fate. But what motivated Leopold and Loeb, wealthy, intelligent, educated, healthy young men? Even after a reading of Baatz, they remain mysterious.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great book; poor Kindle edition, August 19, 2008
The book is absorbing, but the Kindle edition is loaded with typographical errors that make reading difficult. Missing periods at the end of sentences occur on just about every page.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unnecessary detail embellishment?, September 10, 2010
While I appreciate some of the never-before-seen photos in this book, right off the bat, I am troubled by some of details the author has provided. Any prior book or news article I've read about this case clearly stated that the Franks had only three children, Josephine, Jacob Jr, called Jack, with Bobby being the youngest. And yet on page 4 we are introduced to a yet another Franks child, also named Jacob, who is described as being younger than Bobby and a promising grammar school student. The author even describes him fidgeting at dinner the night Bobby was taken. (While Jack is upstairs in bed with the chicken pox.) But who exactly is this mystery boy? Where did he come from? Where did he go? He was never mentioned during the time of the trial. Jacob Franks' 1928 obituary only lists two surviving children. Jack died in 1938 and Josephine was said to be the sole survivor of Bobby's family when she was reached for comment around the time of Leopold's release from prison. Are we to believe that Jacob Number Three died sometime between 1924 and 1928, a time period when the Franks case still very much in the public mind, and the press never even made mention of this other child's death?
I checked the Franks family on the 1920 census, and it lists only Josephine, Jack, and Bobby. So if another child existed in 1924, he had to have been four years old or less at the time of the crime. This doesn't fit with the author's description of him either. I can only conclude this boy never existed.
I can certainly live with one research mistake, but the author actually describing this imaginary kid's behavior at dinner is very troubling and makes me question every other detail in this book.
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