Six of the best books about true crime on college campuses

Randy Dotinga, a former newspaper reporter, has been a full-time freelance journalist for more than 20 years. He previously served as president of the American Society of Journalists & Authors, a non-profit association of independent non-fiction writers founded in 1948.

At CrimeReads he tagged the six best books about true crime on college campuses, including:

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, by Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer is best known for his best-selling outdoor books Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, but he’s also drawn to true crime. In this scathing and powerful 2015 book, he accuses the college town of Missoula, Mont., of failing the victims of sexual assault by dismissing victims and refusing to properly prosecute assailants. As Krakauer explains, Missoula is hardly an outlier. “When an individual is raped in this country,” he writes, “more than 90 percent of the time the rapist gets away with the crime.”

Krakauer, who profiles Missoula victims and their rapists, mostly keeps his fury in check. But we hear his outrage when he writes about how he discovers how many women he knows have been raped. Their suffering is overwhelming and, he finds, their self-destructive reactions “are often held up as ‘proof’ that they are unreliable and morally compromised, or that they deserved to be raped.” Krakauer calls for reform and an end to “the undeserved sense of shame that is so often borne in isolation.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue