Product Description

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. The result is not just a wrenching story of crime and punishment, but a hauntingly nuanced portrait of America's jock culture and the hidden world of unrestrained adolescent sexuality.

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #371643 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-28
• Released on: 1998-04-28
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.00" w x 5.10" l, 1.06 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Amazon.com
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 Library Journal
Curiosity, says journalist Lefkowitz (Tough Change: Growing Up on Your Own in America, Free Pr., 1987), brought him to investigate the web of circumstances contributing to the 1989 alleged gang rape by teenage jocks of a 17-year-old retarded girl in a seemingly image-perfect New Jersey town. The theme of this compelling narrative is disturbing?the difficulty of achieving gender justice compounded by the fact that the socially isolated young woman chose compliance in the naive hope of acceptance, and a set of community values that put young male athletes on pedestals, their various "transgressions" ignored or dismissed. Glen Ridge is probably not an atypical community. Parents, teachers, and others need to understand what Lefkowitz so capably exposes about the "All-American" male cultural setting. Highly recommended for a broad readership.?Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
They were always the popular guys in high school: the jocks. And even though their football team was lackluster and their grades were average, at best, they were still the clique that "ran" the school. Sure, they had occasional run-ins with the police, but in the affluent town of Glen Ridge, it was understood that boys would be boys. Their parents always paid the damages, and the affairs were kept politely quiet. When 13 of these young men were accused of sexually assaulting a mentally disabled girl, the town rallied behind them and did its best to ostracize the girl. It is a case that is still generating headlines today, and Lefkowitz has written a compelling account of the incident and the resulting trials. He examines a part of American culture that appears to condone wildness and aggression in its young males and passive servitude in the females. Our Guys is an insightful work that could be as fundamentally important, and as widely read, as Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia (1994). Highly recommended. Eric Robbins