The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities

I'm a bit suspicious of all the one-star reviews of The Price of Silence, as well as the mobbish shouting-down of anyone who dares to rate it higher. This book is not a masterpiece of forensic crime writing like Dave Cullen's Columbine, but it's certainly not awful either. I gave it four stars, but really would probably give it about 3.5 -- somewhere between "ok" and "above average." Its major flaw is the author's love of paragraphs-long verbatim quotes by seemingly everyone even remotely connected to the case -- the book easily could have been two or three hundred pages shorter without sacrificing anything important, and at times I found myself skipping through page after page of irrelevant ramblings by students, lawyers, and Duke administrators that Cohan had for some reason decided were worth including.That said, The Price of Silence is a generally well-written and thoroughly-researched account of the Duke lacrosse team scandal of 2006, when three players were charged with raping a stripper the team had hired to perform at an off-campus party. Eventually, after it became clear that the alleged victim was a drug-abusing pathological liar, that the prosecutor was shockingly dishonest and inept, and that hard evidence against the players was nonexistent, the charges were dropped. But by this point, the lives of almost everyone directly involved had been permanently damaged, and in some cases ruined.Cohan does a good job of reporting the facts of the case, but he also puts it in a larger context of the problems of American higher education. Looked at one way, it's a story of what can go wrong when a respected regional university forms ambitions of becoming a world-class research institution like Harvard, Princeton, or the University of Chicago while simultaneously being a top-ranked athletic powerhouse like Nebraska or Florida State. There is probably a good reason why Harvard et al. tend to have a relatively negligible presence in college sports -- renowned scholars making $150,000 per year generally don't see eye-to-eye with celebrity basketball coaches making ten times that amount about what a university's priorities should be. Cohan paints a picture of Duke student life as being utterly dominated by a group of elite fraternities, sororities, and athletes, with the men's lacrosse players at the top of the heap, enjoying a level of popularity and access to sexual favors unimaginable to most students. Their boozy subculture comes across as crude, piggish, and Darwinian, and thoroughly anti-intellectual. Not once do I recall a quote from them volunteering a class they'd enjoyed or a book they'd loved. They were at Duke to play sports, get laid, get drunk, and after graduation use their family and team connections to get jobs at Goldman Sachs.Looked at another way, the scandal was a case of ideology -- in this case, the trendy cultural-Marxist narrative of white male privilege, misogyny, and racism held to by many of the school's humanities and social-sciences faculty, as well as much of the student body and, apparently, prosecutor Mike Nifong -- colliding with inconvenient facts, the main one being that the lacrosse players, who as wealthy white jocks were perfect villains, were in fact innocent of the charges. It was disgusting to see people with PhDs and tenure seriously argue that the suspects still deserved to be punished, even if they hadn't actually raped the stripper, because of the political symbolism of rich white boys hiring a working-class black woman to dance nude for them. If the Duke lacrosse players didn't deserve to be at a great university, then neither do many of these "intellectuals." And as a scientist myself, I have to admit it was somewhat gratifying to see that most of the faculty publicly arguing against a rush to judgement --i.e., the ones actually showing sense -- were from the natural sciences and engineering.But ultimately, almost everyone comes out of this story diminished. The wrongly accused lacrosse players still wind up getting their degrees and securing Wall Street jobs appropriate to their caste (except, of course, for the one who wasn't from a rich family), but their names will forever come up in Google searches in conjunction with the word "rape." District Attorney Nifong, by the end of the book, is disbarred, bankrupt, and unemployed, while the fake rape victim is prison for an unrelated murder. Many of the Duke faculty and administrators are exposed as mealy-mouthed, politically-correct cowards who were only too happy to throw innocent men to their doom as long as it won them points with the media. And Duke itself looks like a place where few parents would want to send their children.

I just finished the book which I read in its entirety. If you're not familiar with the circumstances, this is as thorough an account as you're likely to get. As others have noted, there isn't much new here. But I respect the way it was researched, compiled and written and the way in which the author lets the voices of some be as they are - crazy and absurd and in some cases young and stupid. I liked reading about the campus culture at the time because the situation itself takes on a new meaning in this context. The same goes for what is reflected about Durham. Reviews that pick out sentences here and there seem to be missing that the book illustrates how much of the narrative is contradictory when it comes to Duke LAX, then and now. In terms of what could have been better, I did find it a little long and I found some of it infuriating because revisiting it reminds me how ridiculous some of it was, how hard it was to sort it out at the time, and because the events will never be summed up with true clarity. For those who read this and note that my public name is "momatduke", I'm not sure why that matters other than my affiliation is noted.Update - For anyone who read the book and has a different point of view, I commend you for your effort and respect your opinion. For those posting who have not read the book, I can't imagine why you are bothering. Read it or don't but it would be nice if you could refrain from ruining the value of legitimate reader reviews. It's true that I don't post book reviews often and instead review more products on Amazon. I do read and comment on submissions to their breakthrough novel awards which takes a considerable amount of time. I posted on this book because I was an early reader and had a different point of view than many of the other reviewers. I have written hundreds of movie reviews on another site. I can't imagine writing, "I didn't see the movie but I heard it was terrible/inaccurate so I'm recommending you shouldn't see it and instead see this other one I respect." That would be truly insulting to the reviewers who paid their money, used their time and gave an honest opinion of their actual experience.