For the Thrill of It

Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago

By: Simon Baatz

Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins

Length: 20 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

It was a crime that shocked the nation: the 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 were intellectuals - too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. When they were apprehended, state's attorney Robert Crowe was certain that no defense could save the ruthless killers from the gallows. But the families of the confessed murderers hired Clarence Darrow, entrusting the lives of their sons to the most famous lawyer in America in what would be one of the most sensational criminal trials in the history of American justice.

Set against the backdrop of the 1920s - a time of prosperity, self-indulgence, and hedonistic excess in a lawless city on the brink of anarchy - For the Thrill of It draws the listener into a world of speakeasies and flappers, of gangsters and gin parties, with a spellbinding narrative of Jazz Age murder and mystery.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2008 Simon Baatz (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Lot of unnecessary filler

More background and irrelevant information on participants than on crime and criminals themselves. Very boring.

Great book, awful narrator

It's so hard to choose a Worst Audiobook Reader Ever award recipient, because there are seemingly infinite ways to be terrible at it. This guy, though..... this guy's special. I'm actually really worried about him. Does anyone know if he's ok? There's no way this.... um... performance(?) didn't injure him seriously. And there's no way he could digest all the scenery he chewed. There's a very distressing combination of over-enunciating AND over-salivating. I don't even enjoy this much spit-sucking in porn. One does feel one needs an umbrella. Really though, is he alright? It sounds like he's horribly straining every part of himself.

Read by a robot

This thing sounded like it was unedited text to speech. Avoid. Not worth the money.

Too Much Detail

The deranged aren’t worth a twenty hour. Netflix is brimming with all this type of sociopathy porn It is uninteresting and insignificant.

Awful narration

I almost stopped and returned this one - only powered through to hear the story.

The narration is unnaturally precise and overly dramatic. Just awful

Very interesting

This book is interesting. I live in Illinois so I was very interested. This book does not go into depth of the reason for the depravity, just touched on it. It was very much about the trial and I found that interesting.
It really proves that then, as now, the rich are favored in the American judicial system. Not much had changed but then, I’m not sure how it could be.
If you have never heard this story before, I highly recommend it. It’s you are familiar with it, it holds little new but is still a good listen.

A different look into all involved

I found this book to be completely different from how
I suspected it would turn out. I like towel in explaining the attorneys and prosecutors they gave histories of the two and how they wound up prosecuting or descending the two accused. This case is 97 years old, and the judicial system has changed drastically since but you can still see a base of where everything started from and may find that very interesting on top of the details of the case. There are about a dozen other cases mentioned throughout that are used as examples.Without droning on for too long. I highly recommend this book.

Please have this novel RE NARRATED!

Okay, I could barely get through the first chapter before I had to jump to the end and write this review. I cannot listen to this book with this fellow reading it as if it is a Shakespeare play or something!? Maybe that isn’t quite the right assessment but whoever the gentleman is narrating,he has got it all wrong. To bad, because I wanted to get settled and thought this would be a great thought provoking reading. Oh well, on to the next story.

Listen at 30% faster speed

Intriguing tale that risks being ruined by poor narrator, but I enjoyed the whole book anyway by increasing speed by 30%.

Narrators can make or break a book

This was a deep dive into the case of Leopold and Loeb with lots of interesting details that made it worth suffering through the unfortunate narration. If you speed him up it's bearable but the producers should have realized early on that he needed to be calmed down, slurping inhalations needed to be stopped and mispronunciations of local place names needed to be corrected. If I were the author I would be upset to have a good book damaged by bad narration.