Word: lamonts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FROM THE PEOPLE who brought you Lamont Library comes this addled admixture of hysteria and laborious detail called Campus Shock, which leaves you with what Daniel Webster called that "miserable interrogatory". "What is all this worth?" Well, not a whole lot. Lansing Lamont '52 has written a book which will be noteworthy, if at all, only in the quickness of its declension to the remainder heap over at Barnes & Noble, or its ability to heat a small room at Fahrenheit...
...Lamont gives us what his publishers call "a firsthand report on college life today." Feeling around with his First Hand, Lamont discovered that there was a "dark side" to college life, that people didn't just row to Ivy Championships--they had problems, suffered from career pressures, sexual pressures. Just like anyone else. Eureka! Aflush with the joy of discovery, Lamont set his wisdom machine to work and came up with a program involving the end of grade inflation (a grade recession?), the fostering of alternate career routes, the institution of single-sex dorms, God-Knows-what-else...
Admittedly, this is not a complete exposition of Lamont's argument. But that argument seems inherently worthless because it is not, as touted, "first hand," but secondhand, the result of "more than 650 interviews." Throughout, Lamont comes across as an interloper, a strange wanderer on the outside looking in. The punch line goes, "I was there--I know." Well, Lamont wasn't there, and it results in some embarrassing misperceptions. Lamont repeatedly yaps about the "crush in the libraries." What crush? The only crush I've ever seen at Harvard is in Q-world's pinball arcade during reading period...
Even worse, Lamont's interloping secondhand technique results in some slanderous inaccuracies. For example, Lamont scorns a professor at Brown who taught students about espionage but "never asked (the students) to consider the morality of it all." That professor is Lyman Kirkpatrick, former executive director of the CIA and perhaps the most moral man ever to serve in a high echelon there. Moral considerations were central to the course, and moral discussions were so long and so frequent that someone half-jokingly suggested the course be offered in the Philosophy Department. Welcome to journalism, fella...
WHEN THE TREE SINGS by Stratis Haviaras is not, strictly speaking, a novel. More, it is a mosiac pieced together and carried along by the underlying current of a poet's vision. For Stratis Haviaras, now curator of the poetry collection at Lamont Library, is a Greek poet, and this tale of German-occupied Greece is his first book...