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

　　★紐約時報、華盛頓郵報、出版人週刊、科克斯書評，一致盛讚！

　　★「傑出的調查報導作品！」普立茲獎得主朗．薛爾鐃等重量級作家力薦

 

　　隨著雪藏半世紀，1969年哈佛謀殺案的真相浮現，長期隱身其後的複雜問題，也一一顯現其輪廓……

 

　　你得記得，他這麼提醒我，哈佛比美國政府還早建立。你必須要好好記得這件事，因為哈佛不會讓你忘記的。

 

　　一九六九年，是反文化的極盛時期，也是校方致力抑制學生運動的一年；該年冬天，哈佛將開始與姐妹校拉德克利夫學院的合併程序；那一年，二十三歲的哈佛人類學系所研究生、拉德克利夫學院副校長的女兒珍．布里頓，被發現遭人侵犯和重擊身亡，陳屍於麻州劍橋。

 

　　四十年後，一位充滿好奇心的大學生貝基．庫珀，將第一次聽到有關這個兇殺案的耳語。在庫珀聽到的第一個版本中，這個受害人是個無名氏，是位哈佛學生、教授的外遇對象，因威脅要公開不倫關係，於是被教授殺害。即便這個說法後來被證明只是謠言，卻引起庫珀注意背後更複雜的問題：教育界的性別不平等、在「牛仔文化」下男性精英所享有的特權、教育機構的沈默，以及我們應該寫下這些受害女性故事的迫切性──促使她持續追蹤這起案件長達十年。

 

　　本書同時是對崇高學府之中的性別歧視、腐敗與壓迫的反思，也呈現了曾發生在一名年輕女性身上的悲劇，如何影響了另一名年輕女性的生命，更為被歷史遺忘的受害者，寫出屬於她們的故事。(文/博客來編譯)

 

　　A Recommended Book from: The New York Times * The Washington Post * Publisher's Weekly * Kirkus Reviews* Booklist * The Boston Globe * Goodreads * Town & Country * Refinery29 * BookRiot * CrimeReads * Glamour * Popsugar * PureWow

 

　　Dive into a "tour de force of investigative reporting" (Ron Chernow): a "searching, atmospheric and ultimately entrancing" (Patrick Radden Keefe) true crime narrative of an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard and an "exhilarating and seductive" (Ariel Levy) narrative 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.