I just finished a really well done book -- The Short Tragic Life of Robert Peace. I am sorry that it had to be written. I am glad that it was.
Robert Peace was a Yalie from Newark. He played water polo, majored in MB&B, was a member of secret society. And, a little over a decade after graduating, he was gunned down in Newark over drugs.
This book dealt with friendship, race, fitting in at Yale, and the struggles of one student to straddle the worlds of Newark and the academy. I can't say that I saw much of what Robert Peace saw at Yale, even though we played the same sport. Seeing things from his vantage point through this book makes me reflect back on people I knew, experiences I had. It made me wonder whether I really understood much of anything about where many of our classmates were coming from.
Check out some of the reviews by clicking here, or here.
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League
Recently, I blogged about the coverage of rape on college campuses. Since then, the Rolling Stone piece about UVA has been called into question.
Many have written about what the UVA story means, particularly now that some of the details of the account at the heart of the story that kicked off this debate have been called into question. How allegations of rape, how sex and issues of consent and how women should be treated on campus are still important issues to grapple with.
Below is a piece I read on line at The New Yorker by
Margaret Talbot. Thought it was interesting.
What do you think?
Protestors carry signs in front of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia on November 22, 2014.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY RYAN M. KELLY / THE DAILY PROGRESS / AP
Last month, Rolling Stone ran an article about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, based on interviews with a student identified only as “Jackie.” It now appears that key details of the story, reported by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, may not be true. Other journalists—notably, my friend Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt, at Slate, and Paul Farhi, Erik Wemple, and T. Rees Shapiro, at The Washington Post—raised doubts about the reporting late last month, but Rolling Stone dismissed them. Then, on Friday, the magazine issued a statement saying, “In the face of new information reported by the Washington Post and other news outlets, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account.” (An earlier version of the statement had emphasized the magazine’s trust in Jackie, and regretted that it had been “misplaced”—wording that seemed to settle too much responsibility for the story’s shortcomings on Jackie and not enough on the reporter or her editors.)Rolling Stone’s statement did not enumerate the discrepancies, but the Post did.
