Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...speeches begin in 1965, when Grass campaigned for Willy Brandt, mayor of Berlin, then attempting to become Chancellor. In an essay not reprinted in this book, Grass explained, "The writer can become the conscience of his nation when he throws over his desk for a while, and, as a citizen, engages in politics." As a campaigner for Willy Brandt, as a critic of Willy Brandt for allowing the Social Democrat Party to join in the Great Coalition with the Christian Democrats, Kurt Kiesinger's party, and as a president critic of Kiesinger, who took the Chancellorship with a Nazi past...
...MOSTviolent criticism is reserved for Kurt Kiesinger. An open letter to Kiesinger, written to him just before he took office, is reprinted in this book. In a later speech, Grass notes that Kiesinger never answered the letter. He damns Kiesinger not so much for his membership in the Nazi party from 1933 to the end, but for his gall in then, without any reference to his past, becoming leader of the West German Republic, which is supposedly trying to live down the past...
...page, hoping to find reasons not to write an easily resented, condescending pan, I liked it less and less. Even the unbiased in the Lowell House Dining Hall whom I coyly asked, "Have you seen the Yearbook? How do you like it?" agreed with my own bigoted opinion: the book is not only bad, but the weakest product the men on Dunster Street have turned out in years...
This year the editors have included a good deal less of the much-vilified Yearbook writing than usual. What copy there is, though, primarily concerns some of the most tedious identity crises ever recorded. Apparently the book is out to capture what the Harvard experience feels like rather than what happened here last year, but the verbal talent to bring off such an enterprise is nowhere to be found in Three Thirty Three. The editors have consistently let slip past their red pencils verbosity ("the University has long been cognizant of the fact that the issues involved transcend the sphere...
...selected with a bit more care. The good ones (like the WHRB series or the girl combing her hair on page 117) are all the time undercut by self-conscious posed snapshots and full-page pictures of subjects like a Radcliffe bulletin board or a Harvard toilet. Graphically, the book seems reasonably inventive and handsome, though the moody two-page shot of an athlete running up the Soldier's Field steps with last year's sports scores illegibly super-imposed in matching type has to rate as a major debacle. It is also distributing that next to never do pictures...