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TRUE GENTLEMEN

THE BROKEN PLEDGE OF AMERICA’S FRATERNITIES

A highly disquieting but important investigation of one of the most influential subcultures in American higher education.

A chilling exposé of American fraternity life.

At colleges and universities across the country, fraternities espouse high ideals of brotherhood, honor, pride, service, loyalty, and collegiality. They claim to build men, and they inspire profound loyalty among their alumni and fierce protectionism among their undergraduate cohorts. As Bloomberg News senior editor Hechinger, a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, demonstrates in this riveting, infuriating book, these organizations often fall well short of those high ideals. Focusing on Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the most prestigious, popular, and controversial fraternities in America, the author reveals a culture fraught with myriad ills. Many will be unsurprising to those who have attended college, but others are shocking. These include dangerous abuse of alcohol and drugs; dehumanizing hazing rituals; sexual assault, rape, general harassment, and other horrifying treatment of women; rampant elitism; and both obvious and covert racism. The author shows how these problems come with access to politicians and lawyers and other moneyed and influential men. SAE embodies all of these damning flaws. It has experienced the most deaths of all such bodies among its undergraduate members in recent years, and its members have been involved in assault and rape to the point where many female students, when asked about the fraternity, immediately respond with a common play on its Greek letters: “Sexual Assault Expected.” In 2015, the University of Oklahoma chapter was caught on video singing an ugly racist song. Hechinger documents all of this and more in an exposé that, given the influence of fraternity alumni, requires tremendous courage to pursue. In the final chapters, the author offers possible ways forward for SAE and fraternities more generally that might alleviate the ongoing crisis, almost all of which would require a deep commitment to a drastic reduction of alcohol consumption, the elimination of hazing, and other steps that national SAE leaders have begun to tackle.

A highly disquieting but important investigation of one of the most influential subcultures in American higher education.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-61039-682-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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