Word: lopez
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...ENRIQUE LOPEZ, "Hank" to his friends, should never have come to Harvard. Lopez jokes about it. In his last year as an undergraduate at the University of Denver, he explains, a bigshot economics professor took him under his wing, doctored the young man's transcripts to make it look like Lopez had minored in economics, and sent him packing to Cambridge--as a graduate student in Economics. Lopez, who had never really taken any economic theory, went to classes here but, as he put it, "They might have been talking in Swahili." He made it through one year, however...
...Harvard Mystique is one of those books that never should have been written. Lopez does not write well; when he gets in a pinch, he resorts to quoting other authors or citing reams of ridiculous data--in four months of the New York Times, for example, Harvard was mentioned in connection with its graduates three times more than all other colleges combined. Essentially, the book is a 237-page collection of odd quotes, bizarre statistics, dull anecdotes, and drivel. The author strikes a particularly banal chord when he tries to add some organization to his endless list of alums...
...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...