Home › Books › We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a…
We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence
by
85/99
Critics' Rating Index
9/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
95/99
Volume of Reviews
87/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
Dive into a true crime narrative of an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard, of obsession and love for a girl who dreamt of rising among men.You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims. We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.
Reviews
"We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper is a brilliantly idiosyncratic variant of generic true crime, rather more a memoir than a conventional work of reportage, so structured that the revelation of the murderer is not the conclusion or even the most important feature of the book ..."
"In addition to presenting a tense narrative, she delves into the phenomenon and morality of true crime fandom."
"Admirably, Cooper tries to do two things — tell the story of Britton's murder and seek justice for her ..."
"[Cooper] carefully investigates every lead, reports every fact and contextualizes for the reader the culture that gave rise to the original story."
"Reading We Keep the Dead Close is akin to what I imagine it would be like to dive into a trench at an archaeological site and start digging, not with a trowel, but with a snow shovel."
"a stunning achievement—a whodunit page turner with an unexpected ending that is both shocking and, sadly, a little disappointing ..."
"She's smart enough to examine her own motives in searching for the truth about Jane's life ...The book is at its most solid when Jane's old friends talk about her—they are enduringly loyal—and their feelings seem to rub off on the author."
"a compelling portrait of a woman's life cut short—as well as a fascinating exposé of a prestigious enclave within the country's most elite institution ..."
"The book is strongest when we're empathizing with Jane—her romantic foibles, grappling with sexism within academia—rather than with the author."
"Cooper describes her war room, covered with 'theories and photos, a map of Iran, a blueprint of an apartment building, all stuck to my cork boards with dissection needles,' she sounds like Carrie Mathison of Homeland, flirting with the porous boundary between commitment and mania ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!