Word: lamonts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Part of the problem stems from the people Lamont seems to have talked to, or enjoyed talking to, or remembered talking to. This man has radar for the asshole and sonar for the emotional cripple. Consider this quote from a Harvard sophomore: "Taking on a girl is like taking on a fifth course." Or this passage...
...reach a point when you can't blame UFOs anymore, when the caveman comes out of the closet without Marx or Jesus, when the politically retrograde bare their fangs and call it a smile. Here's Lansing Lamont, who can dismiss the entire sixties as "a media-orchestrated protest revel," call the return of protest to college campuses "ugly," and homosexuality a "problem to be surmounted." Lamont yearns for the days when Harvard and the "elite universities" were one big Finals Club, enjoying "comfortable, if snobbish, intimacy" and "benign" parietal rules, all blond hair and blue eyes and a sure...
ENOUGH OF SUBSTANCE: Lamont's style evolved from years of writing for that most homogenized of magazines, Time. Campus Shock is a Time cover story filled with water and wood pulp, a distended magazine article--the very titles wail with the self-justifying banshee pitch of the media-hyped Big Story: "Campus Shock," "Sexual Anarchy," "Grade Frenzy." And the vignettes, written in the best lurid style of not even Time, but True Detective...
Maybe no one should worry, or even notice, when a book like Campus Shock appears. But Lansing Lamont comes out of the same generations as most of America's movers and shakers, and it's quite possible that they share his distorting lenses. While Lamont might be scribbling away unheard in his high-rent New York apartment, the deans and university bureaucrats who really wrote the book, by talking with Lamont and by providing him with students to interview, are making almost all the decisions that shape out lives. People like Derek Bok and Archie Epps, they're still...
Class Reunion is not the worst of the recent books on Harvard. Unlike Enrique Lopez, author of The Harvard Mystique, Jaffe has no axe to grind with Harvard. She's not wailing about the decay of institutions of College Life, like Lansing Lamont in Campus Shock. Her stories read more smoothly than The Mem Hall Murders. In the end Harvard fares pretty well, because she uses it only for background: dropping names of buildings and alumni, reminiscing about sneaking a feel in an Eliot House room or necking on the steps of Briggs Hall. The Harvard name may sell...