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A review by hekate24
Game Over: Jerry Sandusky, Penn State, and the Culture of Silence by Robert J. Dvorchak, Bill Moushey
2.0
Two books in one weekend!
Anyway, I'm giving this a lackluster score. There's nothing wrong with this book. Well... it gets repetitive in some cases, and sometimes the writing is very blatant. But I've given other books four stars before despite having these same faults, because they've offered things to make up for them.
Not so in this case. I suspect this will be a good primer for people who are new to this incident. But, well, State College was my home town and I was glued to coverage of this event. This book ultimate boils down to a paraphrasing of the Freeh report, news articles, and wikipedia pages on the main players involved. The only part that was new to me was how an investigator tracked down victims by using Sandusky's memoir.
Honestly, I just think that overviews of huge true crime events need to wait for at least a decade. And the Sandusky case spans decades and has tons of moving parts. This book tries to cover all the things it mentions in the title (plus Paterno) and it tries to do it in a rather small number of pages. Speaking of Paterno, the book's attitude towards him seems endemic of the problems inherent in writing a true crime overview months after the fact. Some chapters laud him. Others excoriate him. Sometimes both things happen in the same chapter; I basically give no fucks about Penn State football (in fact, State College's sports obsession made me miserable many times as a kid) but is it really any surprise that his funeral service made no mention of the Sandusky case? This kind of back and forth feels like the representation of the conflicting moods a lot of us felt in the months after the charges came to light. It lends it an odd quality of emotional verisimilitude, but it's still kind of... eh.
I would much rather have read the author's take on what the hell happened in that game of telephone between Patern and Schultz and Curley. But the book is silent on that, save saying that it happened. Actually, that's probably the BIGGEST fault of this book; lots of facts thrown at the reader, with very little analysis. Compare this to something like [b:Columbine|5632446|Columbine|Dave Cullen|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402151576s/5632446.jpg|5803859] which has gotten critiqued, sure, but the author takes on massive amounts of primary evidence and brings his own hypotheses to the table. But that's probably easier to do once the dust has settled.
I can tell you right now that Penn State is fascinatingly weird place, with a lot of good and bad things about it. Someday we'll see a book or documentary that is as incisive as this topic deserves. But I think we'll need to wait a while for it.
Anyway, I'm giving this a lackluster score. There's nothing wrong with this book. Well... it gets repetitive in some cases, and sometimes the writing is very blatant. But I've given other books four stars before despite having these same faults, because they've offered things to make up for them.
Not so in this case. I suspect this will be a good primer for people who are new to this incident. But, well, State College was my home town and I was glued to coverage of this event. This book ultimate boils down to a paraphrasing of the Freeh report, news articles, and wikipedia pages on the main players involved. The only part that was new to me was how an investigator tracked down victims by using Sandusky's memoir.
Honestly, I just think that overviews of huge true crime events need to wait for at least a decade. And the Sandusky case spans decades and has tons of moving parts. This book tries to cover all the things it mentions in the title (plus Paterno) and it tries to do it in a rather small number of pages. Speaking of Paterno, the book's attitude towards him seems endemic of the problems inherent in writing a true crime overview months after the fact. Some chapters laud him. Others excoriate him. Sometimes both things happen in the same chapter; I basically give no fucks about Penn State football (in fact, State College's sports obsession made me miserable many times as a kid) but is it really any surprise that his funeral service made no mention of the Sandusky case? This kind of back and forth feels like the representation of the conflicting moods a lot of us felt in the months after the charges came to light. It lends it an odd quality of emotional verisimilitude, but it's still kind of... eh.
I would much rather have read the author's take on what the hell happened in that game of telephone between Patern and Schultz and Curley. But the book is silent on that, save saying that it happened. Actually, that's probably the BIGGEST fault of this book; lots of facts thrown at the reader, with very little analysis. Compare this to something like [b:Columbine|5632446|Columbine|Dave Cullen|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402151576s/5632446.jpg|5803859] which has gotten critiqued, sure, but the author takes on massive amounts of primary evidence and brings his own hypotheses to the table. But that's probably easier to do once the dust has settled.
I can tell you right now that Penn State is fascinatingly weird place, with a lot of good and bad things about it. Someday we'll see a book or documentary that is as incisive as this topic deserves. But I think we'll need to wait a while for it.