Customer Reviews

Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969

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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.

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