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

Reading Level
Grade 9
Time to Read
9 hrs 48 mins

Reading Level

What is the reading level of We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence?

Analysing the books in the series, we estimate that the reading level of We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence is 8th and 9th grade.

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

Readability Test Reading Level
Flesch Kincaid Scale Grade 7
SMOG Index Grade 10
Coleman Liau Index Grade 8
Dale Chall Readability Score Grade 6

Reading Time

9 hrs 48 mins

How long to read We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence?

The estimated word count of We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence is 146,785 words.

A person reading at the average speed of 250 words/min, will finish the book in 9 hrs 48 mins. At a slower speed of 150 words/min, they will finish it in 16 hrs 19 mins. At a faster speed of 450 words/min, they will finish it in 5 hrs 27 mins.

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence - 146,785 words
Reading Speed Time to Read
Slow 150 words/min 16 hrs 19 mins
Average 250 words/min 9 hrs 48 mins
Fast 450 words/min 5 hrs 27 mins
We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper
Authors
Becky Cooper

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

146,785 words

Word Count

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

512 pages

Pages
Hardcover: 512 pages

15 hours and 47 minutes

Audiobook length


Description

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.