Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969

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Description

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.
One spring day in 1969, Roger Rosenblatt was once puzzling over Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of a Jar” with his Harvard students. But discourse about ordering poetic universes looked as if it would end when that class did: “All over the hour I used to be teaching, about three hundred students and others seized University Hall.” Coming Apart is a record of his own nervous responses to cultural cataclysm, at the side of those of students including James Atlas, Al Gore, Martin Peretz, and James Fallows.

With his trademark mix of quizzicality and reason, Rosenblatt strives to be aware “the folklore of the moment,” the politics that led to the student takeover and the rift it left at the back of. He is strong on the individual response though less protected relating to the general: “I have no idea why, but there was once an impulse running under the events of that spring to let things go to hell, and it was once 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.

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