Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 [Hardcover]

Roger Rosenblatt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1997

A professor at Harvard in the late 1960s gives a compelling, firsthand account of the riots that occurred when some students took over the administration building on campus and demanded reform, and the changes that took place over the following months. 30,000 first printing. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

One spring day in 1969, Roger Rosenblatt was puzzling over Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of a Jar" with his Harvard students. But discourse about ordering poetic universes seemed to end when that class did: "During the hour I was teaching, about three hundred students and others seized University Hall." Coming Apart is a record of his own nervous responses to cultural cataclysm, along with those of students including James Atlas, Al Gore, Martin Peretz, and James Fallows.

With his trademark mix of quizzicality and reason, Rosenblatt strives to understand "the folklore of the moment," the politics that led to the student takeover and the rift it left behind. He is strong on the individual response though less secure when it comes to the general: "I do not know why, but there was an impulse running under the events of that spring to let things go to hell, and it was acted upon by young and old alike." Sterner commentators have before now critiqued Rosenblatt's supercivilized examinations of the American psyche, and Coming Apart can only provide more ammunition. The wars of his subtitle may seem too tame for some, but Roger Rosenblatt convinces that the wounds (particularly his own) are permanent.

From Library Journal

In this memoir, Rosenblatt (The Man in the Water, LJ 1/94) examines events surrounding the April 1969 student takeover of University Hall, Harvard's main administration building. Rosenblatt was then a fair-haired Harvard-educated English instructor with a bright future. His role was as an elected member of the Committee of Fifteen, charged with investigating the protest and determining the appropriate university response. It is not clear why he chose to write this book nearly 30 years after the events; yet from his current vantage point, he believes the student takeover was unwarranted and a disaster for Harvard and that similar action at other universities marked the decline of what universities should represent?the untrammeled search for truth. While for Harvard, it may have been a coming apart, for Rosenblatt it was also his coming of age. More sophisticated analyses of the antiwar protests are widely available. Still, this is a useful title for university libraries.?Nicholas Burckel, Marquette Univ., Milwaukee
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co (T); 1st edition (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316757268
• ISBN-13: 978-0316757263
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,359,410 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ROGER ROSENBLATT is the winner of a Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, a Peabody Award, an Emmy, and two George Polk awards. He writes essays for Time magazine and for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He lives in Manhattan and Quogue, Long Island.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb, April 25, 1998

By 

D. C. Carrad "augustabookman" (Augusta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (Hardcover)

This is everything a book ought to be -- wise, thoughtful, well-written and inspiring. What a pleasure to make the author's acquantance and learn from him. He writes insighfully not only about the student takeover but also about Harvard arrogance, the sad individualism of its undergraduates, and its place in American culture. Though I disagree with his politics, I am most impressed with his wisdom. Particularly telling are the statements from the faculty members who were refugees from Hitler's Europe and who watched with despair as a new generation of arrogant storm troopers (their words, not mine) began to destroy a fragile institution. Unlike the other reviewer, I was not there. In April-June 1969, when most of the events in the book occur, I was a first lieutenant serving in Vietnam. However by September 1969 I had arrived in Cambridge to go to Harvard Law School, and I saw the aftermath of the takeover and the strike at first hand. The author got the tone exactly right. Buy this book and read it even if you have absolutely no knowledge of the events described and no interest in them. You will re-read this book with pleasure and gain much from it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars maybe ya' had to be there..., April 23, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (Hardcover)

Roger Rosenblatt's concise autobiographical take on a few critical months in 1969 at the monument that was Harvard supplies a refeshingly different perspective on that period. Caught in a virtual no man's land between student and academic sage, Rosenblatt's ill-fated journey avoids revsionist, populist, and reactionary classification. Instead, what emerges is a provocative tale of personal growth and self-realization. I loved the book, but the, I was there, and that probably makes all the difference