Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hardly seems the stuff of which bestsellers are made. Academic in tone, occasionally plodding, inundated by footnotes, the nation's latest buzz book is not a fast summer read. Yet in only one month in the stores, more than 35,000 copies of Energy Future have been sold at $12.95 each, and Random House is beginning a fourth printing...
Energy Future is the result of a six-year project directed by Professor Robert Stobaugh of the Harvard Business School and the book's co-editor, Political Scientist Daniel Yergin, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; five Harvard Business School faculty members and doctoral candidates contributed to the book. Some chapters were written by one or two team members, but the whole group supported the findings...
...large part, the book is popular because fervid environmentalists can find in it justification for their thesis that nuclear power and coal are dirty, dangerous and unreliable, while solar energy and conservation are good and can provide the necessary energy. Yet the authors take pains to distance themselves from the small but vocal faction of extremists who hope that energy shortages will hold back technology, slow industrial growth, break up large industry and fragment society into smaller groups of people, tending their own gardens and building their own windmills. As the Harvard experts stress in Chapter...
Lopez got the idea for the book, he says, when he was watching the Watergate hearings on television. Every time one of the commentators talked about a graduate of Harvard Law, he recalls, Harvard was mentioned. This didn't happen with other colleges, of course. Of such inspiration, great literature is not made. "Would Henry Kissinger have been Secretary of State if he had been from Michigan State University instead of Harvard?" he asks. Unfortunately, Lopez can't seem to answer his own question. When you ask him to define mystique, he hesitates for a moment. Mystique, he says...
...somewhat gratuitous to try and pick apart a book that falls apart of its own accord. Lopez is consistent only in his insulting and pretentious tone, strange for one so attached to mother Harvard. Beyond that, the chapters ramble without direction, and often fail adequately to cover their topics. The section on the undergraduate college, for example, is a messy heap of old famous grads, stories about buildings, and nasty quotations from anonymous sources who hate Harvard...