How long does it take to read We Keep the Dead Close?
A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence
Becky Cooper
We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper takes about 9 hours 17 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 17 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2020. 506 pages, about 139,150 words.
19 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 15 hours 28 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 17 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 48 minutes |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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 apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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 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.
Subjects: Sociology, Feminism, Violence, Women, history, Murder, Memoir
