Part mystery, part exposÇ, Thernstrom's gripping account of a murder/suicide at Harvard (which she reported on for the New Yorker) combines fascinating case material with great seriousness of purpose. In May 1995, just days before commencement, Sinedu, a Harvard undergraduate from Ethiopia, brutally murdered Trang, her Vietnamese-immigrant roommate, and then committed suicide. The crime was both shocking and puzzling. Yet little explanation was offered by Harvard, which seemed to want to suppress the story. Thernstrom (The Dead Girl, 1990), herself a Harvard graduate (and daughter of Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, see below), discovers some troubling factors at the school, including a view of multiculturalism that lacks true understanding of other cultures; the inadequacies of mental health services there and on most American college campuses; and a flawed system for advising students (exemplified by the troubled Dunster House, where both girls lived). She also finds that Harvard was dishonest and manipulative in its handling of the case. Thernstrom adroitly peels away the layers of mystery surrounding Sinedu's motives and portrays with great sensitivity the private and cultural worlds of two young women who came to Harvard to realize their dreams. She even travels to Ethiopia in search of clues to the murderer's elusive character and background. What she pieces together is the compelling and terrible story of a lonely young woman whose obsessive fantasizing about an ideal friend leads her to a psychotic jealousy that ends in the fatal act of revenge against the unresponsive object of her attention. Equally powerful is Trang's story, one defined by thoughtfulness and a belief that it is possible to aspire and to succeed. Finally, contemplating how this story has forever altered her relationship to her alma mater, and ruminating on the ethics and procedures of investigative journalism, Thernstrom moves beyond the actual case without ever losing sight of it. Thernstrom has written a powerful indictment of Harvard and a cautionary tale of alienation's destructive power—even among the most talented. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48745-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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