Rating: 
Summary: GET READY FOR THE PITY-FEST!
Review: This book was highly touted by a trade publication, that shall remain nameless because I don't want to embarass them, as an excellent read.
It turned to be a "why me" book about a guy who get's mugged and then tries to fit in with his brother in a frat house. He goes through ritual hazing and then wonders why he's screwed up.
The book offers no real insight into Lands mind and why he so insecure. True, he is deeply troubled, he is on anti-depressants, but must we know the exact contents under his bed and in his pocket?
I was begging for some kind of resolution...."I learned this about myself....", but it never came. It ambles on and on and on. All I kept thinking is "Boo-Hoo, you got mugged and hazed in the same lifetime....and????"
The narrative is a compete snoozfest with exchanges that amount to;
I said "Hey", Will says "hey", Brett says "yeah", I said "ok", Chance says "Cool", I say "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz".
Skip it and wait for the MOW.
Rating: 
Summary: Lords of discipline lite
Review: First off, I was baffled by a review that stated that Brad was "betrayed" by his brother? How? It seemed to me that things would have been worse had he tried to interfere in his older brother's initation/hazing. I would have done the same thing. Not that I condone hazing. Still, after reading Pat Conroy's novels, I expected a lot worse. I have no idea what the author omitted, but most of the stuff seemed tame in comparison. (Not that I have ever been hazed.)I agree with the reviewer who stated that the narrator reveals too little about himself. I kept hoping to read about him making a connection that did not center around the frat - when the girl smiled at him in class, I cheered, thinking that maybe there would be one bright spot in an otherwise bleak book. Not to psychologize too much, but it occurred to me that perhaps the author undertook the hazing to prove to himself (if subconsciously) that he could take that kind of trauma without falling apart - as he had during the kidnapping. Finally, as someone who was depressed throughout most of college, I can only hope the author finally received the therapy he needed to recover from his trauma.
Rating:
Summary: a tepid disappointment
Review: I had been reading great reviews of this book for a few weeks before it came out and had a lot of interest in reading it.I was predisposed to like it, but I found it surprisingly lukewarm, tedious, and ultimately kind of irritating. The first section, dealing with the carjacking and assault, is very well done and moves right along, Land's minimalist, stream-of-consciousness style serving the story well. After this, though, the book essentially chronicles this young man's descent into a severe, anhedonic depression and a form of obsessive-compulsive
disorder. He elected to go to college and pledge a frat where he underwent the usual boneheaded initiation stuff, and yes any alert reader can easily draw a parallel between the initiation ordeal and his earlier assault, but I have a feeling Mr. Land would have been just as depressed and traumatized by almost anything he undertook at that point in his life. I mean, the frat stuff just ain't that bad. The author laments that he has to eat breakfast with his pledge brothers for a whole week. The frat jerks yell in his ear. They threaten to hit him with a football. He has to fetch one of the frat boys an egg roll, and then, sob, the guy doesn't even eat it! Sunlight coming in a window depresses Mr. Land. A teacher's cologne makes him "wince". The smell of the frat house makes him "scrunch his nose." His body "quivers" when his car goes over a bump. "It hurts to look at things." "The air hurts." Get the picture? This guy is monumentally depressed and as fragile as an eggshell. (And as an aside, it's not just the author. His fellow pledge brothers all seem like exquisitely delicate little hothouse flowers. After being hit with a football in the dorm hallway, two of the initiates tremble and reel around like they just survived an ambush in the Mekong Delta.)And on and on it goes, Mr. Land bruised by everyone and everything. He doesn't like the air conditioning in the dorm. He reads in the fraternity manual that hazing is prohibited and is so outraged and dumbfounded that hazing still goes on that he has to repeatedly slap himself so he can go to sleep. Let's see, everyone out there reading this who has SLAPPED themselves to sleep, raise your hand!
I have sympathy for the author, who was subjected to a vicious beating in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. I've certainly never experienced anything horrific like that. I'm simply questioning why this book needed to be written. It turns out to be weary and self-pitying, and then ends without any sort of resolution or logic. It intends to represent some kind of closure or finality that the author returns to the scene of his beating and throws away all the ephemera he's been collecting in his pockets, but no reader who has just endured over 200 pages of this young man's depression and excruciating self-awareness can truly believe that this can represent a new beginning for him.
This isn't a bad book, but I found it tedious and lacking in all the power, brutality, and savage, compelling honesty that so many have claimed to find in it. Caveat emptor.
Rating: 
Summary: Everybody Else Got It All Wrong
Review: Yeah, this is a teriffic book. Outstanding writing that in and of itself makes this totally readable. But everybody else who has reviewed it has gotten it wrong. Sure, this is a book about Brad's experiences. But it is much, much more a book about his homoerotic relationship with his own brother ... and that's what's newsworthy and breakthrough about this book. From the loving prose to the dedication, the author is signalling his love -- true love -- for his brother, and that is beautiful. In the genre, this reviewer can't think of another book that covers this perspective. Fascinating ... and most intriguing.
Rating:
Summary: unputdownable
Review: One of those rare, wonderful books that, once begun, must be read swiftly through to the end, to be absorbed all of a piece. Land's an astonishingly mature and assured writer for one so young, and his spare, idiosyncratic style truly seems appropriate and deft, not just the affectation of someone trying to seem writerly. The other reviews here have well covered the story, and there's no point in further dignifying the accusations from the nose-out-of-joint frat boys and former frat boys who don't like their dirty jockstraps aired in public, so I'll just say that you don't have to be a frat boy, or a former frat boy, or even a boy, to find much to ponder, and be terrified by, in Goat. Superb.
Rating: 
Summary: Not as Powerful as it Could Be
Review: Brad Land's Goat is an interesting memoir that falls a bit shy of something really powerful. (I'm thinking something along the lines of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces). Land certainly lived through not one but two harrowing experiences as a relatively young man. First, he is kidnapped and brutally beaten in his home town and then has a collection of horrible experiences as a fraternity pledge. That Land has gotten enough distance from these experiences to write about them is commendable. However, I kept feeling that the book lacked a certain raw power, that Land was somehow holding back. The minimalist writing style he uses lacks a little oomph. The book is a quick and compelling read--especially if you are curious about the goings on in a college fraternity. I see in these reviews that there are many who question the veracity of Land's recount of his pledge experience, but I think that questioning somehow misses the point. Land clearly had a difficult time in his late teens and early twenties--he has recorded it as he remembers it, as it affected him. I don't think this can be read as a searing indictment on American fraternity life and I don't think it's meant to be one. This is a man, working through his own demons, using his writing to put his own past in the past.
Rating:
Summary: literary hazing
Review: I find both funny and revealing that so many reviews of this book come from frat boys who are furious that Mr. Land could write a book claiming acts of violence occured in his fraternity, yet I can't help detect in the tone of these reviews a kind of implied: What this Land character needs is a good old fashion beatin' to keep him from writin' this stuff. as someone who joined a fraternity in the early nineties, I also find it interesting people are so shocked by the hazing incidents described in this book that,in my day, would be considered powder puff drills. but enough frat politics. what I liked about this book was the sparse yet poetic prose that maintained a hypnotic narrative tension that riveted me to the page from beginning to end. This is difficult to accomplish in any genre, but especially the memoir where the author has the onus of: so why should we care? I care about Land's character because of his emotional honesty. (I don't care whether or not he was actually asked to clean chew spittle out of a cup) I care about Land's character because of the style and honesty and his ability to tell a story. period. sure the book has some flaws and at times land sounds a bit too fragile in tone, but i liked that he walked that line. i didn't really like the ending very much either, but i'd been so entertained by the time i got there, frankly, i didn't care.
Rating:
Summary: Wow a fantastic read
Review: Wow it seems like everyone responds in really extreme ways to this book (especially the frat guys who are mad that a former pledge is being honest). Well I loved the book. To me it was about not fitting ways and how we try to connect to others and fail. Also the ways we hurt each other (sometimes on purpose and sometimes not). Maybe some readers think there is no point to talking about that. To me those are very powerful and hard-to-tell life truths, and GOAT did a crazy amazing job telling them. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Biased.
Review: I was roommates with Brad Land for a year in 2002, as he was revising an early version of Goat for his thesis in graduate school. He told me of his experiences earlier, but already he was fairly removed from them...nothing prepared me for the beauty and sparseness I found as I read Goat in book form for the first time. I love that he absolutely leaves it up to the reader to pick up any judgement or meaning of the book individually. By paring down and exposing his weaknesses and fears to us, he is showing ultimate courage. By his raw honesty and the honing of his words, he is a bigger person. He has no fear of showing us his unusual connection/love to his brother Brett, while at the same time being unafraid of making Brett human and at times pinpointing his conceited behavior. I look forward to years and years of Brad's writing. He has truly made a huge first step in Goat. I am honored to know him, both as a friend, and moreso as a writer.
Rating:
Summary: dealing with deamons
Review: In this book, Brad Land, does an outstanding job describing what he went through. I felt that I was standing there on that same ground beside him. "The Thing" as they would refer to it was life shattering and his dependancy on his yournger brother to help him through it. Family and brotherhood are shown to be quit different. In the frat house, Brett, Lands real brother realized what they were doing to the pledge class is somewhat similar to what Brad had gone through a year ago. Brad and Brett's love for oneanother is what gets them both through "the Thing". Awesome book.
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