Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder (A Virago V) - Softcover

Harvard prides itself on being a melting pot: the student body is 19 percent Asian, 7 percent foreigners, and more than one-third of all of the students are minorities. So when a junior from Ethiopia, Sinedu Tadesse, stabbed her roommate 45 times and then hung herself, the university came under immediate scrutiny from the press. Melanie Thernstrom approaches this tragedy with the sensitivity of someone who cares about Harvard, as an alumna and daughter of a professor, and she engages the reader with an unassuming, personal style. In the end, Halfway Heaven presents a disturbing picture of how a small, prestigious community can neglect its mentally-ill members. As quotations from Sinedu's diaries reflect all too clearly, what it takes to do well in school does not necessarily build a healthy psyche: "When I am with one person, I shake with nervousness fearing that we will run out of things to say and she or he will be bored. For math I had a teacher; for painting I had a teacher; for social life I had no one."

Also recommended is Thernstrom's first book, The Dead Girl.

Praise for Melanie Thernstrom:

Halfway Heaven:

"A book of rare, illuminating depth... Melanie Thernstrom once again demonstrates a great, shattering gift for writing about forgotten people."
--Mikal Gilmore, author of Shot in the Heart

"Halfway Heaven takes us deep into the twin Harvards--the seemingly cozy world of the insider...and the terrifyingly lonely one of the outsider."
--Stewart O'Nan, author of The Speed Queen and The Names of the Dead

"Fascinating...this book is a wake-up call to American universities everywhere."
--Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer

"Like Hannah Arendt, Melanie Thernstrom here beautifully explores the etiology of evil."
--Lauren Slater, clinical psychologist and author of Welcome to My Country

The Dead Girl:

"Eloquent...a notable model of the female Bildungsroman."
--Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books

"The Dead Girl is groundbreaking, new and startling, and will surely have a long life in literature."
--Harold Brodkey