HPL Book Group

We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper

Tuesday, May 30 at 7:00

This month's meeting will be held in the Whiton Room at the Hingham Public Library. No registration is necessary.

The HPL Book Club is a friendly group of library patrons and bibliophiles which has been meeting regularly for over ten years. We average 15-20 members each meeting and are always happy to see new faces! Our meetings are held on the last Tuesday of every month at 7pm, and we alternate between fiction and non-fiction titles -- suggestions always welcome! Whether you're someone who wants to meet regularly or just pop in when a title piques your interest, you'll always be welcome in the HPL Book Club.

Copies of the book are available to pick up at the Reference desk starting around the first of each month.

About the Book:

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.