We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper

"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 available in print, book on CD, Playaway, and on Libby as a digital book and audiobook.

September's meeting of the Afternoon Book Club will be HYBRID (meaning you can either attend in-person in the Library Community Room or virtually via Zoom.)

Please email neemail1@minlib.net if you wish to be added to the list to receive the Zoom link to this event.