The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary [Paperback]

James Simon Kunen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1881089525 | ISBN-13: 978-1881089520 | Publication Date: August 11, 1995 | Edition: 1

The student rebellions of the 1960s caught through the eyes of a Columbia College undergraduate during the spring of 1968. A classic that sold 35,000 copies in hardcover, The Strawberry Statement retains its appeal to college students sensitive to the world's injustices while confronting their own adult future.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wise, reasonably humane, very funny.... I'm suddenly very hopeful about my country again, knowing that a brilliant and honest young citizen like Mr. Kunen is coming along." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"An elegant literary stylist, always seeing himself as though through an ironic eye on the ceiling above the scene of action, in command of an affecting wistfulness that makes him seem a sort of politicized Dustin Hoffman.... Moving, troubling, assertive, and eloquent." --John Leonard, The New York Times

"Kunen might be described as a young, soft-core radical--a kind of New Left Charlie Brown.... You're a good man, James Simon Kunen, and worth listening to." --William Bradee, Book Week

"Like Yossarian, Kunen is acutely sensitive to the inconsistencies and absurdities that mark this world, and he writes with a shrewd sense of irony about it--and himself." --Robert A. Gross, Newsweek

From the Back Cover

The student rebellions of the 1960s caught through the eyes of a Columbia College undergraduate during the spring of 1968. A classic that sold 35,000 copies in hardcover, The Strawberry Statement retains its appeal to college students sensitive to the world's injustices while confronting their own adult future.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (August 11, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1881089525
• ISBN-13: 978-1881089520
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.6 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #113,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James S. Kunen is the author of popular and critically praised books that grapple with legal and political issues in a personal way. A prize-winning journalist, he is best known for his 1968 memoir, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary--his account of the antiwar student strike at Columbia. It has been translated into four languages and widely used in college history and writing courses. MGM's film version of the book won the Jury Prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival.

Graduating from Columbia in 1970, Kunen was sent to Vietnam by True magazine to write a series of articles, which led to his book Standard Operating Procedure: Notes of a Draft-Age American (1971).

After working as a freelance journalist, Kunen earned his juris doctor degree from the New York University School of Law and joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where he moved from misdemeanor cases to representing people accused of serious crimes, including murder. He recounted his experiences in 'How Can You Defend Those People?': The Making of a Criminal Lawyer (1983).

Returning to journalism, Kunen worked as an op-ed editor for Newsday, a contributing writer for Time magazine, and a featured writer and senior editor for news at People magazine, where he reported and wrote cover stories on Donald Trump, Tawana Brawley and Abbie Hoffman, among others. His reporting on a tragic school-bus crash led him to write a book, Reckless Disregard: Corporate Greed, Government Indifference, and the Kentucky School Bus Crash (1994.

Kunen left People in 2000 to serve as a director of corporate communications at Time Warner Inc. in New York City, where, among other things, his job was to maintain employee morale during the company's merger with AOL and the rounds of layoffs that followed. In 2008, after being laid off himself, he embarked on a search for meaningful work that led him to his current position teaching English as a Second Language at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, N.Y. He describes the journey from corporate PR man to teacher of immigrants in his new memoir, Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life.

Kunen's Time magazine cover story on the resegregation of America's schools won him a First Place in Features award from the New York Association of Black Journalists and an award for reporting in education from Unity Awards in Media. As a freelance writer, he has written for The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, Harper's, New York, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, and other leading publications. He was a columnist for a national magazine, New Times.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Oh, the times, they were a-changing, September 27, 2004

By 

Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (Hardcover)

In the early 1970s, as I struggled through my adolescence, James Simon Kunen's "The Strawberry Statement" was one of my favorite books. Part diary, part reflection and part polemic, it allowed me to participate vicariously in the confusion, rage and activism of Columbia's student strikes of the late 1960s.

Kunen was the kind of kid I wanted to be. A nerdy kind of a guy, he participated in anti-establishment student actions at Columbia University. He protested construction projects that supposedly disenfranchised Columbia's neighbors and helped occupy the offices of college officials. He was an activist, though on the fringes, "stickin' it to the man" before the phrase became widely known. Kunen was the poster child for my teen rage against a governmental machine that had my parents' blind support. His writing is genuine and funny, capturing the hydra-headed angst of being a long-haired college kid in 1968. No wonder I liked the book!

Kunen's description of student organizers like Mark Rudd nailed (albeit unconsciously) the leaders of the period as typical politicians, who carefully managed the mob's righteous indignation with their own positioning for future leadership roles. Kunen's description of university officials poignantly captured their vapidity and their befuddlement at being questioned by their under-age charges. The book is a perfectly-posed snapshot of a culture teetering between a passive age of obedient complacency and an emerging age of anti-authoritarian mistrust and challenge.

Thirty years later, I also see some of the narcissistic silliness that defined the 1960s. The war in Vietnam, which presumably fueled protests, is strangely absent from Kunen's writings, giving his musings a tinge of empty-headedness rather than profundity. Marxism, which appealed to a generation of college radicals, seems worn more as a badge of distinctiveness from his parent's unreflective capitalism rather than a lived reality. For all his desire to be different, Kunen is depressingly the same as many post-adolescents, crossing swords with adults who don't take him seriously, missing the big picture while fighting the good fight.

As a way for adolescents to get in touch with their desire for activism, "The Strawberry Statement" is a gem. As a snapshot of being 19 years old in late 1960s - with its half-blind groping toward an unseen and hopefully brighter future-it is priceless.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Important memoir from Columbia radical about '68 riot, May 13, 1999

By 

rampageous_cuss (Under Billy Penn's Hat) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (Hardcover)

I first read this book back in the late '70's, when I was in college myself. I strongly sympathized with a lot of the things the author was saying, which seemed just as true then in terms of broad philosophical concerns.

The book is really kind of picaresque, though, and is mostly about the author's days wandering around the Columbia campus during the 'student unrest' of spring 1968. It seems to me now to be an accurate picture of the state of mind (and ego!) an adolescent caught up in the excitement of a hopeful ferment. 20 years later the radicalism looks pretty absurd, and the naivite of a handful of ivory-tower revolutionaries believing that they would somehow remake the country in the face of popular disapproval (Oh yes!) and a complete lack of long range plans and goals, is laughable. Still, there is a lot of crie du couer here, mixed together with teenage truculence.

Kunen was 19 when he wrote the book which would make him 50 now. He was recently a reporter for TIME magazine, and wrote a '97 article that can be looked up at the TIME website about the children of the radicals. He also wrote a follow-up to The Strawberry Statement which I THINK was a TIME article, in '88 I think.

If you find the subject interesting I would strongly recommend RADS by Tom Bates about '60's radicalism in action at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

'One of these days I may fight in earnest and altogether so that I won't have to fight any more.'

Maybe. But probably not.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Personal Manifesto, July 26, 2000

By 

Linwood I. Greer (Richmond, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (Paperback)

Easily one of the most readable and personal accounts of the radicalization of American youth in the sixties. I read it when it was first published and it blew me away. I followed Kunen's career on through his work with the Liberation News Service and his life in a New England commune and he did a magnificent job of chronicling our times.