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We keep the dead close : a murder at Harvard and a half century of silence

by Becky Cooper

364.1523 /Cooper
True Crime

"1969: the height of counterculture; the year Harvard would begin the tumultuous process of merging with sister school Radcliffe; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious graduate student in Harvard's Anthrlopology department, would be found bludgeoned to death in her apartment. Forty years later, Becky Cooper, a curious undergrad, will first hear whispers of the story: The dead was nameless. A student had an affair with her professor, and he murdered her in the Peabody Museum. Though this rumor would prove false, it started and investigation that would consume Cooper's life for the next ten years. WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is a narrative 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"--Dust jacket flap.

Fascinating. The rumors of a death some 40 years previous instigate a journey of research, sifting through stories, facing and naming some hard-learned truths, and personal reckoning for the author. -Candice