Our Guys - Softcover

Lefkowitz, Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375702695 ISBN 13: 9780375702693

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

A shocking true-crime story of America's jock culture and the hidden world of unrestrained adolescent sexuality in one seemingly idyllic suburban town.

In March 1989 a group of teenage boys lured a retarded girl into a basement in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and gang-raped her. Glen Ridge was the kind of peaceful, affluent suburb many Americans dream about. The rapists were its most popular high school athletes. And although rumors of the crime quickly spread through the town, weeks passed before anyone saw fit to report it to the police. What made these boys capable of brutalizing a girl that some of them had known since childhood? Why did so many of their elders deny the rape and rally around its perpetrators? To solve this riddle, the Edgar award-winning author Bernard Lefkowitz conducted years of research and more than two hundred interviews.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Los Angeles Times Prize Finalist
An Edgar Award Finalist

About this title

Review:

Leslie, a sweet-natured young woman with the mental age of an 8-year-old, just wanted to be friends with the high school football stars. When they invited her down into the basement rec room of a suburban home, she jumped with joy at being included. The young men raped her--with a baseball bat and a broomstick. In this vividly detailed book, Bernard Lefkowitz brings us into the daily life of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the hometown of Tom Cruise. It's an affluent white community that values propriety, order, discretion, continuity, and a fantasy of the gentleman-athlete. Lefkowitz writes of the boys who raped Leslie: "'These Glen Ridge kids, they were pure gold, every mother's dream, every father's pride. They were not only Glen Ridge's finest, but in their perfection they belonged to all of us. They were Our Guys." What's ultimately most shocking about this crime is how ordinary it was, how predictable--how in one way or another it's happening now, all across America.

From the Publisher:

"Riveting. . . .In a way that makes for compulsive reading, Lefkowitz has exposed the substrata of evil in a seemingly idyllic town. Most troubling of all, you come away with the realization that what happened in Glen Ridge could happen anywhere."
--Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action

"Lefkowitz's extraordinary chronicle...is an important book, one that should be read by parents and educator's alike...It's possible to believe that there is not a whole new batch of "our guys" graduating from high school this year all across America...We want to think that crimes like the Glen Ridge rape are a consequence of a brutalizing environment and occur only in the impoverished inner cities...But as Lefkowitz writes: "These Glen Ridge kids, they were pure gold, every mother's dream, every father's pride...in their perfection they belonged to all of us." And if a community like that, without knowing or intending it, is raising its boys to be abusive in their dealings with girls and women...then what's going on in the rest of America? Is there some dark unforeseen underside to the American Dream that leads decent, privileged boys to behave like a pack of jackals? Lefkowitz...argues persuasively that there is...for if we are raising our male children to be feral, which is to say, if they are becoming incapable of empathy for others, especially their female counterparts, then what will their children be like?"--New York Times Book Review, front page

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0375702695
• ISBN 13: 9780375702693
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528