Rating: 
Summary: reader and liker of memiors
Review: ...
Is the prose "amazing," and the narrative "uniquely hip." Sweet Christ on crutch it is not. The subject alone is powerful enough to carry the story, and does not need I don't think a melodramatic, bad nickname-giving, grad schooly nonfiction voice to stand between us and the stuff that went on. There's the sensitive-observer-in-a-harsh-world approach, and in that case the observer becomes important. JT LeRoy's work is a good example, but the problem is that almost no one is anywhere near that good, including Mr. Land, who even with the help of Random House's editors, sounds like a whole lotta other memior-writing-at-the-time-where-memior-sells writers, whose pasts are self-inflicted, and whose talents are not proportional to the number of zeros on their paychecks.
Rating: 
Summary: soulful, intelligent...
Review: this is one of the best memoirs you'll ever read. it's subject matter is intense and interesting, but it's the strong sense of life on every page, and the heart of the writer that make it lasting, and a work of art...
i couldn't put it down
Rating:
Summary: A memoir for those of us who normally hate memoirs
Review: This is the greatest book that I have read so far throughout the year. The prose is amazing, the discriptions vivid, and the plot heart-wrenching. I can easily relate to the writer, Brad Land, and can apply many of his same discoveries to my own life. This is a great debut, and I await to see more from this writer.
Rating:
Summary: The fall of man, as done by boys
Review: Ah, the fraternity. The brotherhood. It always sounds so friendly, doesn't it? Of course, the French chopped off a lot of heads before they made it part of their republican mission statement. The thing about the brotherhood, and this is a rule: the collective Sombebodies are brutally adept at spotting a weakling, given to hunting them out by cruel means, and unthinkingly swift to humiliate. Dey got da power.
As Brad Land has no doubt read and perhaps been told by mental health professionals, by way of compensation: the punchline of his suffering at the hands of the men who beat him, is that they took away his power. And what better way to get it back than the seductive corruption of what you might call frat boy character-building.
He knows the need to belong and the breath of fear that says the whole could come down on his head at any time -- and he hopes to reinvent his broken self with the company of puffed up supermen. And then comes the moral choice.
His story is personal and bitter and known to all of us, in some measure. That of being cast upon this earth, into this society of of our species, and trying like hell to fit in -- with a growing desperation as the hurts pile up, and the fading conviction that you have any say in your destiny or that you are worth much at all.
Like, what happened, man?
Goat has a rattle boned groove, the voice of Land squaring up. But there's a musical squeakiness there, too, an awkward and distorted self awareness, where the hard-boiled tale and the tongue required to tell it mashes and sometimes smothers the broken hearted fugure of an optimism born again.
But isn't that the voice in the heart of every teenager and ``young adult''?
I understand why Goat is recommended for the preps of adulthood. But I suggest that Land's book is for the older people who lost themselves to violence or sheer disappointment, and who have struggled to build themselves up again -- and yet have failed to keep their optimism alight. Goat just might give them a boost.
Another great book that gives an extraordinary and shocking look into an elite fraternity is Peter Hillary's `In The Ghost Country'. This is a haunting story about how a man copes when everyone in his world withdraws from his company, and he's left to face the horrors of his past -- such that all his dead friends rise up in living color to keep him company. And he's glad to see them! This is what Peter Hillary went through on his walk to the South Pole in 1999. Estranged from his two companions, on the loneliest trip of a lifetime of traumatic and mind warping adventure, Hillary looks down into himself, retreats to his mind, and becomes a robot when dealing with the others in the tent. It's a spooky read. The writing is hallucinogenic.
Like Land, but to an ever greater depth, Hillary reflects on moral choices and grim realities. We learn ``how he got his colder heart.'' This is near the end of the book, and you've already been taken right out there, like you can see things, and it's like you can't believe anything bigger could happen. All I'm going to say is it involves cutting a rope. Whew!
Tweo thumbs up for Brad Land and Peter Hillary.
Rating:
Summary: The word impressive doesn't do Goat justice.
Review: Goat will be a book that is talked about for a long time. For so many reasons, really. It's authentic qua memoir because it resists the tendency to become a confessional. But more importantly, the language here is so penetrating. Each turn of the page with Land's prose solicits a kind of emotional trauma-I find myself cringing, and then whimpering, and then celebrating, and then all over again. And this voice Brad Land shares with us, allows us to take part in, is so brave. The reader finds located here a deep pathos, it recollects the loneliness of Salinger, the heartbreak of Dave Eggers, the Fear and Trembling of Kierkegaard. But not just that, Goat finds it's home not just in it's pathos, nor in the reconciliation of it-just the opposite-Goat finds it's greatness in it's ability to articulate, if only for a moment, the aporetics of a forgiveness that seeks not to synthesize that pathos, but to let it be, to even let it flourish. This is a difficult thing to do. To avoid the tendency, the attractive one really, to sympathetically make things fit, to make things right, even when they don't. Brad Land's life is a testament to this-things are incessantly out of joint-his brother, the hazing, the smile and the breath everywhere. The turmoil with his younger brother Brett, although heartbreaking through and through, is ultimately a culmination of sublimity, of profound brotherhood, a true celebration, for both Brad and Brett, of what it means to love. And the prose in Goat is as beautiful and tragic as the story it tells, at once as sweet and innocent as the narrator, pointing us towards the luminosity of love, then somersaulting into it's opposite, the darkness, the opacity, the nihilistic seductiveness of wanting to belong. Structurally, Goat is complex in this way. At one point, Land simply shows us this darkness he's privy too, holds it up for us to see. But even further, the true authenticity of Goat lies in its ability to perform that darkness for the reader. At first enticing us with an interesting story, and then, as if he's holding our hand at the beginning of a haunted house, Land guides us through the to and fro, the perambulations of his story-until, unbeknownst to the reader, we feel as if we too have participated in this tragedy, that we have been there ourselves, punched in the stomach and gasping, breathless. In this way Goat is a confrontation, an emotional upwelling, radically blurring the line between audience and author, between text and subject. As if the images of these years have passed in front of us like a piece of film over a projector, we forget we are reading, we forget we aren't Brad. And when I read Goat I want to call Brad and weep with him, want to rub his shoulder and put him at ease, want to never leave his side. And I think this is the experience of every reader of Goat, we identify with his anxiety, his sweetness, and we have this ridiculous feeling that we would know Brad if we saw him walking down the street-or even further, that deep down in all of us, somewhere, there is a part of us all that has been isolated and scared like Land, and an even bigger part of us that longs to be as brave. When I read Goat, I want to be there for Brad. To protect him. For some reason, I want to tell him I'm sorry.
Rating:
Summary: intimidatingly wonderful
Review: This book is intimidatingly wonderful. Land captures a haunting and yet compassionate world that obviously only he knows. I found myself immediately sucked into the sparse detail and thrilled as the characters reluctantly began to unveil themselves.... screw trying to be fancy, the book is freaking great. This is how it goes. First, it breaks your heart. Then, Land delicately begins to sew you up and, in the final pages, sends you off with a heart joyously pounding with the hope of redemption. This isn't the feel good hit of the summer, but courage abounds. And if you have a brother, when you close this book, you're going to want to call them and tell him you love him. And just as Lavar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, "You don't have to take my word for it..." Read it. Don't deny yourself a magnificent book.
Rating:
Summary: Gritty, Moving and Smart
Review: This is a book that is gripping and moving, telling the story of a teen's frightening encounter with violence and abduction, also deftly weaving in the larger themes of alienation and belonging, how we grow up and what events define our lives. Land writes with great skill, combining gritty prose with wonderful insights that make the book both moving and universal.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth the time it takes to read. Goat is Gutteral
Review: I will put my entire review in perspective my quickly mentioning that "Goat" can be read in a single evening even by a moderate reader. "Goat" gives a raw gritty portrayal
Of life as a young collegiate trying to "fit in". Pledging to a fraternity is a course of events that causes the "rusher" to call into question much and often is a defining moment in adult development. Brad Land, the author, who's style is straight forward and uncompromisingly youthful at times engages the reader in what can honestly be said as a series of events that aren't worth reading. However, put in the condensed and easy to read format in which the author provides this work it is interesting. It took me a little over two hours to pound through this one and I really thought the "memoir" was well developed and perfect for the audience (which I see as late high-school to 20-somethings) I especially related to Lands inability to get help or sympathy from the police. This book is worth the time it takes read and will stick with you like some ordeal that a friend just divulged to you. It is bound and printed beautifully in its hard-cover version.
--Ted Murena
Rating:
Summary: Raw
Review: I cannot understand, for the life of me, how anyone can say that this book is boring. If you were to delve deeper into the book and look at the relationships with his brother and the frat brothers you can find a whole different story. This book is moving and raw. It is about the passing into manhood and what "makes a man". I encourage anyone to read it.
Rating: 
Summary: I kept waiting for something REALLY bad to happen...
Review: The problem I had with "Goat" was that, for a story about the horrors of fraternity hazing, nothing REALLY disturbing ever happens to the author at the hands of his fraternity brothers. I kept finding myself wanting to ask "what were you expecting?" It has always been my understanding that when you join a frat, you expect a certain amount of embarrasment, demeaning treatment, and yes, maybe even some physical abuse during the "pledge" period. Throughout the book, the author never recieves anything worse than a few bruises and hangovers. No sexual abuse, no broken bones or stitches, and as soon as he quits the frat, all of it immediately stops.
Goat is well written and fast-paced, and at only 209 pages it was a very quick read. Was its tale worth the price of admission, however? I say no. If you're still currious, though, my advice is to wait for the paperback.
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