Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 - Hardcover

Rosenblatt, Roger

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316757268 ISBN 13: 9780316757263

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

About the Author:

Roger Rosenblatt is a contributing editor at Time and The New Republic, and is a featured essayist on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0316757268
• ISBN 13: 9780316757263
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 234