#in the world of academics where competitiveness runs rampant...this boy who loved this girl gave her the credit she deserved
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I googled We Keep the Dead Close a little and was intrigued! Can you tell me what you liked about it?
oh yey!! i'm always happy to rave about a book i've enjoyed, so i can totally share my thoughts with you :)
we keep the dead close: a murder at harvard and a half century of silence is less a standard true crime book, and more half memoir and half a chronicling of the author's meticulous research process. as an undergrad at harvard, becky cooper, heard repeated tellings of a near mythic campus legend: of a nameless female grad student who had an affair with a tenured archaeology professor in the '60s who murdered her in a ritualistic manner and got away with it thanks to the omnipotent powers-that-be at harvard and the case remained unsolved ever after.
the story stayed with cooper until she felt compelled to learn all that she could over the course of the next decade. to untangle the truth from the cautionary tales that were whispered in the hallowed hallways of harvard. the very beginning of this story starts with the uncovering of a name: jane britton, who was so much more than the victim she became in the final moments of her life. and then it unfurls from there: not just to the facts surrounding the murder, but also the intimate details that make up a life, both loved and lost, and the surrounding culture that could allow this silence to perpetuate for decades while recognizing the power structures that still thrive in today's world.
this book is an exhaustive record of cooper's research efforts—the archives she dug through, the events she snuck into, the websites she trawled, the doors she knocked on, the people who would and wouldn't talk to her, the jobs she accepted and turned down to help her make the time to tell this story—but also an examination of her own biases and motives. how we affect the stories that are told and how we tell them, and also the ways in which we, explicitly or not, try to force facts to fit into familiar narrative story beats. it's also concerned with the power structures in the world of academia, specifically at harvard, that so often protect powerful men at the expense of vulnerable women, no matter how talented and promising and innocent, all in the name of reputation and tradition.
potential suspects rise and fall away like waves crashing on a shore as cooper and those who loved jane try to make sense of the violence that ended her life so young, but this is not a book that is confined to the whodunit nature of most true crime tales. rather, cooper is more compelled to tell jane's story in a way that both honors jane and is honest about her.
if you like non-fiction, have ever enjoyed true crime, and have some time to devote yourself to a 400+ page book, i highly recommend we keep the dead close. the case was solved in 2018 while cooper was still writing the story (though perhaps some answers bring forth only more questions), but i recommend against googling the case beforehand and instead letting the experience wash over you.
#ask#anonymous#we keep the dead close#becky cooper#there's one particular moment that struck me in all the ways grief can be quiet and profound#while cooper is doing her research and digging through the archives she finds a journal dated after jane's death with her name on it#and cooper comes to realize that#the summer after jane died her boyfriend returned to the archaeological dig they'd been on the year before#and he'd been assigned jane's old trench. and so he put her name with his on the journal to record his notes.#he did it quietly. he did it without comment. and not only did he list her name but he put it first.#in the world of academics where competitiveness runs rampant...this boy who loved this girl gave her the credit she deserved#that was denied to her by the ruthlessness of chance
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