Acclaimed as the Jewish War and Peace, The Settlers, along with its sequel The Harvest, marks the crowning achievement of the author Norman Mailer hailed as "one of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition."At the turn of the twentieth century, Feigel and Yankel Chaimovitch are among the many Russian Jews caught up in the nascent revolution. Worried that their two oldest children, Reuven and Leah, could be rounded up into a pogrom, Feigel and Yankel allow them to scout out if their ancient homeland, Eretz Yisroel, is the refuge they're searching for. Soon, Leah and Reuven write with promising news: all is good, and Eretz Yisroel is a land of unparalleled beauty. Buoyed by the good reports, the Chaimovitch family flees Russia to begin anew.Yet not everything is as easy as Leah's reports had made it sound. The pioneers face innumerable hardships: poverty, disease, grueling physical labor, and tensions with their Arab neighbors that...

The mid 1920s introduced Americans to a new type of murder: two immensely wealthy eighteen-year-old university graduates from Chicago randomly kidnapped and murdered a little boy, attempted to obliterate the identity and sex of the body before hiding it and then tried to collect the ransom – simply as an intellectual experiment. Levin attempts to discover the psychology of the two young men, to understand how the two of them, Leopold and Loeb, one of them handsome and popular, the other quiet and scholarly, were capable of an act so far beyond rational understanding. For drama, for horror, and for the deepest kind of compassion and comprehension, COMPULSION has rarely been equaled among contemporary psychological novels.