A review by buttercupita
Compulsion by Meyer Levin

3.0

Fascinating story of the "Trial of the Century": Leopold & Loeb in 1924. I knew of the case as a line or two in a US History textbook, but this novelization by Meyer Levin, who covered the story as a cub reporter in Chicago and classmate of Leopold & Loeb, gives a very thorough treatment to the two brilliant but disturbed young men who abducted and killed a younger boy in a quest to commit the "perfect crime." The book was strongest as it developed the relationship between the two men and contrasted them with the narrator (a character standing in for the author himself.) I plodded through the section that dealt with the trial as it seemed pretty repetitive, but thought Levin did a brilliant job in ending the book with a very thought provoking parallel from his own experience in Europe after World War II. In all, very glad I read it.