Nonfiction Book Club

Please join our librarians for a discussion of We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper on Thursday October 13th at 1:30 p.m.

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, 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. 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.

Copies of the book are available on Libby and may also be reserved for pickup at the library. 

Please note that this will be a hybrid event. Participants are invited to join us in person or via zoom. 

Register Here for Zoom.

Register Here for In-Person.