About to begin his second year of college, Land agrees to give a stranger a ride home from a party. The stranger brings a friend, and the two men abduct, rob, and beat Land, leaving him bleeding on a country road. His wounds heal more quickly than his psyche; the already awkward young man spends the year recovering, then transfers to a new school where his brother is already enrolled. Though he is the elder, Land has always played catch-up to his handsome, confident, and athletic sibling, and despite a warning inner voice, he pledges to the same fraternity. Hazing is barbaric. The author escapes with crippled self-esteem, but another pledge pays a far greater price. Land's clipped prose lends this memoir a feeling of immediacy, and he adds novelistic weight to simple, almost primitive dialogue. But while events are sometimes moving, he's not very successful in creating a meaningful narrative arc out of bad luck, a bad decision, and a collegiate woe that has seen its share of headlines. Strongest as a cautionary tale about fraternities.
Keir GraffCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Land's memoir about fraternity hazing and his relationship with his charismatic, more confident younger brother, Brett, has received a lot of publicity. However, in spite of all the hype, it is not well written and it's unlikely to resonate with most teens. Brad, 19, recovering from a vicious assault by two hitchhikers he picked up, decided to follow Brett to Clemson University. The steely, mysterious sophomore was a Kappa Sigma, and an admiring, uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin Brad decided to pledge the same frat. Teens will either identify and sympathize with Brad or become increasingly annoyed with his naïveté. Getting Vaseline smeared in one's hair and being pegged with footballs will probably (if unfortunately) not seem terribly out of the ordinary-as hazing rituals go-to most readers. To Brad, they were acts of savagery. When he bought a pack of cigarettes and the cashier told him that he was going to die, he took her for a modern-day Cassandra with an important message from the dark beyond. Brad dropped out of rush. In what would be an embarrassingly bad finale if this memoir were fiction, a man from his pledge class died of a heart attack the day after he was informed that he hadn't been accepted into the fraternity. Brad blamed the Kappa Sigs. The best part of the book is Land's description of his relationship with his brother, which is reminiscent of Rich Wallace's treatment of the best friends in
Wrestling Sturbridge (Knopf, 1997). However, that title runs circles around
Goat.
-Emily Lloyd, Rehoboth Beach Public Library, DE Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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