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We Keep the Dead Close

A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

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We Keep the Dead Close

By: Becky Cooper
Narrated by: Becky Cooper
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the US 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 23-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 rumour proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for 10 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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Becky Cooper (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Murder True Crime Crime Scary Student

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All stars
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Well written and narrated a sad but very interesting story, which goes into detail without tipping over.

Worth a listen

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An amazing book. The time went so quickly it was that engaging and kept me riveted until the last minute.

Outstanding

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Well, this story drags on and on. She loves to read out every bit of dialogue from the past and her voice never changes tone. I couldn't finish it. It just wouldn't end. Awful book and awful narrator

Utter Drivel

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Overly descriptive, bordering on dreary. I'm bailing out with six hours still to go. I've learned nothing so far.

Long, very long

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