Author: Meyer Levin

“Leopold and Loeb seemed to present modernity with its own deformed image. In a strange way, their single crime encapsulates the moral anarchy that was responsible for so many millions of deaths, in war and revolution and Holocaust, during the 20th century. As in a laboratory experiment, they demonstrated on a small scale the forces that, unleashed, could destroy the world. Meyer Levin makes this suggestion repeatedly in Compulsion, his fascinating 1956 novel about the Leopold and Loeb case, which has just been reissued by the enterprising new Jewish publisher Fig Tree Books.”

Read Adam Kirsch’s full review for Tablet.