Compulsion

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Levin, Meyer	4-week checkout	Due 05-12-2024

"Based on the Leopold and Loeb case of 1924."
Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have it all: wealth, intelligence, and the world at their feet as part of the elite, upper-crust Jewish community of 1920s Chicago. Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert, a genius who longs for a companion whom he can idolize and worship. Obsessed with Nietzsche's idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily picking and murdering a Jewish boy in their neighborhood.

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A Psychological Thriller submitted by sVfGI7Glt2pz7GZgVB90 on July 19, 2020, 9:11am
Fascinating novelization of the Leopold and Loeb murders. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were brilliant college graduates at the University of Chicago who, at 19, decided to perform the perfect motiveless crime, and killed a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks. Levin deftly portrays affluent Jewish-American life in 1920s Chicago. A exceptionally good book.

Complement with the film Compulsion (1959) starring Orson Welles.